Second Life: Stitching the Sacred
Thursday, July 16, 23, & 30 | 1-4 PM
Free!
Registration is free and prioritizes access-seeking, disabled, and underserved communities who are looking to build community and grow within the arts. The Textile Museum is committed to making this workshop accessible and barrier-free as possible. If you have already attended a Second Life Workshop, please consider opening space for new community members to access these free workshops.
This workshop explores sacred and Islamic geometry as a reflection of the systems that shape both the natural world and our shared human experience. Working with thread and paper, we will build simple geometric forms through stitching. The process is slow, repetitive, and sometimes imperfect. Patterns emerge gradually, almost the way something grows with one point leading to another.
Along the way, we’ll sit with how these forms mirror larger systems: nothing isolated, everything in relation, held together through small, deliberate actions. There’s an emphasis on restraint in this methodology; using only what’s needed, paying attention to rhythm and letting the work unfold at its own pace. Participants are invited to settle into the meditative act of weaving, where focus shifts from outcome to process. It becomes less about finishing something and more about staying with it, noticing what changes when you slow down. This workshop offers space for reflection, material engagement, and shared experiences.
All materials will be provided, though participants are encouraged to bring photographs, prints, or other paperwork to stitch onto; extending the process into something personal and giving new life to what might have otherwise been discarded.
About Second Life: Sustainable Textile Workshops
‘Second Life: Sustainable Textile Workshops’ is a series of free; sustainability focused workshops developed with the Textile Museum of Canada and contemporary local artists. The series converges ecological thinking with art-making opportunities for our community. Starting in January, each month, the Museum will bring in an artist who confronts the climate crisis by rethinking materials and reimagining textile processes, decolonial methodologies, and sustainable craft traditions. Together, artist and participants will reform reused materials to create new works of art through a variety of techniques. These textile-focused artistic mediums will include weaving, embroidery, crocheting, quilting, natural dyeing, felting, upcycled fashion, or mixed-media fiber practices.
Facilitator Bio:
Leila Fatemi (b. 1991, Milan) is a contemporary visual artist currently based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Through a combination of material and textual research, her practice unfolds across a variety of mediums including photography, collage, archival materials, textile, pattern and printmaking. Bridging themes of postcolonialism, gender, and spirituality, Fatemi’s work challenges viewers to consider their role in relation to the representational accuracy and cultural consequences of Orientalized subjects. Her work offers alternative perspectives surrounding the colonial gaze, ethnic representation, and collective numinous experiences by employing methods of subversion and reclamation as tools to resist imperialist legacies.
Fatemi received a BFA in Image Arts: Photography Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and internationally and has been featured in online and print media. She was the first-place recipient of the Clyde & Co. Art Award for excellence in visual art, a finalist for the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award in 2020 and was the 2022-2023 Black, Indigenous, People(s) of Colour Residency recipient at Open Studio.
This program is generously funded by Canada Council for the Arts.
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