Sold Out! FREE The Serious Dyeing Workshop: Silk + Plants

Description: There are natural materials present in our everyday walks or commutes across the city that can add colour and story to fabrics. These natural materials can be anything from the flowers you grow in your yard to the leaves from a tree you admire. Please join us for an afternoon workshop with Andre Paradis and Wednesday Lupypciw as they teach us how to add colour from natural materials onto silk scarves. This natural dye process involves kitchen ingredients like vinegar in combination with rust from metal objects to help transfer those colours. An important step in this process is the arrangement of your natural materials to build patterns or stories across your silk scarf. We can reflect the connections we hold to our homes or the landscapes that are dear to us. At the end of the workshop, you will have a silk scarf that reflects you and your relationship to the land.

Audience: This class is open to mixed-ability participants ages 16+.

Supplies: Please bring natural materials and botanicals that reflect your connection to your home. This can be flowers from your garden or leaves from your favourite tree. These will be used to add color to your scarf so make sure you are comfortable with these materials being used for the dying process.

Registration cost:   FREE

Did you know that Members of the Leighton Art Centre get 10% off the registration cost of all workshops and kids’ summer camps?  Please visit https://leightoncentre.org/join-us/become-a-member/.

Artist/ Instructor Biography:

Andre Paradis is a born and raised Calgary artist who has attended the National accessArts Centre for fifteen years. As a multidisciplinary artist, Andre enjoys trying anything and everything the NaAC has to offer. The NaAC community is very important to him, and he enjoys making along with his fellow friends and artists. Outside of art, Andre enjoys bowling and volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. Andre is very keen to learn about other cultures and joined the NaAC’s Korea Art Exchange project in 2021 and his work was exhibited in Seoul, Korea. He finds much of his inspiration through cultural learning and meeting new people, and he often acts as the welcoming ambassador for the Ways of Knowing artist cohort.

Wednesday Lupypciw is from Calgary, Alberta—Mohkinstsis—where they let dandelions and thistles grow to help the local bees. She makes fancy mattresses to make money. Wednesday has an art practice in textiles and sort of does astronomy research, but this is done mostly while procrastinating on other, larger projects. The purposefully lazy Feminist art and activist collective LIDS, or the Ladies Invitational Deadbeat Society, is one of those projects. The output from all of these things is different, but the politics are the same: queer, pluralistic, fairly compensated, critical. Lupypciw is a Fibre programme graduate from the Alberta College of Art + Design, and has worked and exhibited in various spaces throughout Canada including the Textile Museum of Canada, The Art Gallery Of Alberta, The Banff Centre, The Klondike Institution for Arts and Culture, TRUCK and Stride in Calgary, the Feminist Art Gallery and FADO Performance Art in Toronto, Centre SKOL and La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse in Montréal, and EMMEDIA (also in Calgary).