by Elissa Barnard
The airy ARTSPLACE Gallery, Annapolis Royal, is full of the whispering voices of history, hidden lives, and dropped threads in Julie Rosvall’s poetic and profound exhibit I am Torn and I am Mended.
In this show, the textile artist and printmaker takes two steps forward, adding new layers to an already meaningful, metaphoric art form. She decided to work with found lace garments, instead of her own knit lace pieces, for her soft ground etchings on paper, textile relief prints, and paper lithography. These aren’t Frenchys dive finds but articles she feels personally connected to as a maker.
As a person who loves old things and hates to waste anything, Rosvall has also taken her own damaged large-scale lithography prints, cut them into sections, and “mended” them in large visible stitches. She accents tears and creases with gold leaf in the style of kintsugi (Japanese golden repair).
Rosvall partly perceives her damaged prints and textiles as connected to her own “wonky body” as she continues to recover from knee surgery and a back injury. “Just because my knee doesn’t work doesn’t mean I don’t work,” she says. “You sew it up, you put it back together, and you carry on.”
As a craftsperson and former program director at Craft Nova Scotia, Rosvall cherishes patterning among people as much as in textiles. “It is all about connections whether it’s the mug you drink your coffee out of or a piece of jewelry. It’s about the connection to the maker and their respective world.”
In her diaphanous and mysterious images, she suggests historical narratives as she honours the process of craft-making and the often little-known makers of craft. Her broken and mended works beckon viewers to concoct their own stories, to ruminate on remnants and relics, to see imperfection as part of human life, and to perceive repair as an act of hope and honour.
Mrs. Trask’s Skirt #1—Rhubarb, 2025, is a life-sized, textile relief print of a torn lace skirt on white cotton rag paper. Delicate, disconnected threads drift into an open hole of frayed edges; this hole becomes the edge of the universe, a jumping-off point into the unknown.
In Mrs. Trask’s Skirt Remnant #3, 2025, Rosvall stitches up the hole on paper using hand-spun, hand-dyed yarn in highly visible mending, recalling mothers and grandmothers darning socks and sweaters.
Rosvall reveals her love of nature, art, and community in the stories embedded in her work. Mrs. Trask’s Skirt is about Mrs. Gwendolyn Trask, an avid gardener like Rosvall, as well as a genealogist and baker active in her community of Yarmouth. Rosvall heard about Mrs. Trask on an episode of Sherrie Graham’s Nova Scotia Kitchens podcast in which Graham interviewed Mrs. Trask, her neighbour, as she made rhubarb clafoutis. One day when Graham helped her neighbour clean out her closets, she came across two skirts that Mrs. Trask’s mother, Huldah Guiou, had knit for her in the 1930s.
As Graham tells it on her Substack: “I couldn’t quite bring myself to toss them without somehow acknowledging the beautiful handwork created almost a century ago, so I secretly squirrelled them away and contacted textile artist Julie Rosvall.”
The artist loves to work in black ink with forays into blue. However, for this piece she concocted a delicious pink close to the colour of the rhubarb in her garden. Viewers have responded so positively to this pink that Rosvall plans to experiment with more colour, specifically yellow for the second skirt. This yellow links to the forsythia in both Mrs. Trask’s and Rosvall’s yards.
In a lovely coincidence, the rhubarb connects to Wolfville fibre artist Jali Giroux (1959–2009), who gave Rosvall one of her three rhubarb patches. Giroux also knit Rosvall an onion-skin-dyed shawl as a thirtieth birthday present. The actual shawl, mended, is on exhibit as well as the artwork, Mended—Jali’s Shawl, 2024, a paper lithography, large-scale detail of the shawl repaired with gold leaf and in stitches that are rivulets of wool, making a landscape of the pattern. The wool Rosvall uses in her repairs belonged to Giroux.
Rosvall decided against any colour for her delicate white-on-white impressions—debossings on cotton rag paper—of the Greenspond doilies she found in the bottom of a basket shoved away on a shelf in a Newfoundland antique store. (They belong to a collection of found objects from her 2024 artist-in-residency at The Rooms / Parks Canada, Terra Nova National Park.)
She calls the doilies “ghosts.” No one knows who made them or how they got into that basket. “So much work went into them; they have an incredible history, and it’s a shame for them to disappear.”
Rosvall started knitting as a child and trained in weaving, spinning, dyeing, and knitting. In 2010 she encountered Canadian artist Betty Goodwin’s soft ground etchings of material and found objects, notably her iconic vest inspired by her father’s Montreal vest-making business.
Rosvall’s first soft ground etching, in which an object is put directly through a press, was of her own Dutch-lace, six-by-six-inch swatch pattern printed with instruction from New Brunswick artist Bob Morouney of Hidden House Press. “That was the jumping off point.”
I am Torn and I am Mended was at ARTSPLACE from February 21 to April 11, 2026, after being shown at the St. Francis Xavier University Art Gallery in 2025. Rosvall hopes to tour it to Newfoundland and her native New Brunswick.
As someone who thrives on human connection, Rosvall is part of an Annapolis Valley art group with Sheri Hancock, Sydney Lancaster, and Bonnie Baker; they exhibit “work that starts from one thing but becomes something else entirely” in Otherwise at Harvest Gallery, Wolfville, August 15 to September 13. She also belongs to the FoodArtNature community-based organization offering visitors and locals connections with Annapolis Valley producers, makers, chefs, and artisans.
In her careful, considerate use of hands-on, technical print methods, Rosvall creates a deeply layered form of contemporary art that is beautiful, homespun, and philosophical.
(For Mrs. Trask’s rhubarb clafoutis recipe go to: Mrs Trask’s Rhubarb Clafoutis and Sherrie’s Rhubarb Custard Squares )
