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 )

Bringing together Atlantic Canadian weavers, quilters, sculptors, basket makers, and storytellers to examine textiles, Conversation Threads, curated by Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa, runs at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia from February 28 to May 3, 2026. Seventeen artists are included, with work spanning decades and a sense of timelessness woven into their practice.

On opening night, I walked into the reception area through the gallery’s courtyard door, with music and conversations welcoming visitors. People dressed for the occasion with comfort in mind, that particular winter–spring calibration Nova Scotians manage intuitively.

Familiar faces gathered around the spiralling stairwell at the centre, drinks in hand, circling the same conversation: the Nova Scotia government’s recent proposal to cut arts, culture, heritage, and tourism funding. Grant programs were reduced or eliminated. The artists, administrators, gallerists, and others in the room, whose livelihoods are threaded into the fabric of this province, felt the weight, along with a growing frustration at how little care the provincial government showed the sector. The exhibition brought a reminder of why their work mattered.

Descending the stairs, I was greeted by Alana Morouney’s Knotwork, where two hands emerge from the form, one at the upper left and the other at the lower right. Rather than meeting in a handshake, the two wool hands, dyed with knotweed, extend from the intertwined lines of the knot itself. Each hand appears to hold the structure in place, as if steadying the woven form that binds them together. It is Morouney’s homage to the market vendors, local makers, and the people who sustain New Brunswick through seasonal tourism and daily trade. The piece asks what holds a community together once the tourist season ends and the attention moves on.

I walked past Knotwork, past the other pieces on the walls and the crowds who adored them. Then Darlene Baker’s I Am Conflicted About This Relationship stood on its own: a silver gas tank covered in pink tones and floral decoration. The object is both nostalgic and uncomfortable. Baker shows her family’s gas station and auto repair shop as a space that shaped her early understanding of femininity, patriarchy, and ecological cost, experiences she absorbed long before she had the language to name them. The work holds the tenderness of what was alongside the damage beneath it, without resolving either into something easier.

Across from the gas tank, another colourful work stood out: Albert Lohnes’s The Red, White, and Blue Crocheted Rocking Chair. Made sixty years ago, the piece could not have anticipated what the Canada–US relationship would look like now, but it did not need to. The knitted work covers and moulds itself to the chair’s frame, with the American flag woven into the seat. Some tensions, it turns out, have always been rocky.

Next, I walked toward Portrait of the Artist as an Essential Worker by Hannah Genosko and Sarah Mosher. The work consists of two quilts made from uniforms the artists wore during the COVID-19 pandemic, one from Canada Post and the other from the NSLC. The garments hung on the gallery walls, documenting what traditional media and its sensational news cycles cannot by holding in place the anxiety, the daily risk, the labour of showing up. Frontline workers are often spoken about during crises and less often afterward. This work, along with the recent national postal strike, highlights the consequences of overlooking those who hold society together.

Past several more works, Oakley Wysote Gray’s Lapigot — Small Pox is where the exhibition’s weight gathered most intensely. A bodysuit stands draped with a Hudson’s Bay Company blanket, its famous red, yellow, and green stripes marred by bloodstains. Lacework across the fabric suggests the marks of smallpox rashes. Tears and slashes open at the torso and thighs. Gray, from Listuguj First Nation, made the piece as part of a collection titled Mei Eimotieg — we are still here. A fitting title for a work made in 2024, a year before the Hudson’s Bay Company declared bankruptcy after 355 years of operation. The blanket carries centuries of colonial history: the consequences of exploitation, disease transmission, and the displacement of Indigenous communities from their lands. Gray’s piece was already doing its work before the closing. Yet, the collapse of the institution does not erase its history; it just makes the stain more visible.

These five works, among seventeen, demonstrate what textiles have always done: archive the things that official records miss. Labour. Frontline life. Colonial harm. Generational knowledge is passed hand to hand, stitch by stitch, like a community refusing to let go of itself.

Divine timing or pure coincidence, the show opened at the right moment. For everyone in that room carrying uncertainty about what comes next, the works offered evidence of a long-enduring Maritime resilience that has always found ways to hold itself together and pass that knowledge on. Fabiyino lets the pieces breathe out the essence of preservation and resistance rooted in this place. What became clear is that the thread, regardless of how much it is pulled, stretched, or pressed from every direction, does not need permission to hold.

Rooted in the forests of Cap Rouge, Donica Larade’s art practice highlights native flora and fauna and encourages conversations around conservation, ecology action, and queer experience. Donica’s ability to capture fleeting moments in nature’s moments of kismet is unique. Whether they’re exploring a fresh flush of edible maritime mushrooms, studying the anatomy of a Highland fairy, or embedding sea rocket and a gannet wing into a cyanotype quilt, her attention feels exact and alive. Her unique ability to articulate a moment shines through.

Larade comes from an Acadian family displaced in the Expulsion, and the stories of that time live on in her art and profound relationship to the Cape Breton Highlands. Her mediums shift with the seasons, but an environmental throughline ties the work together.

In the wild, you’ll find Donica carrying a large tote bag full of various art supplies: some gouache, a well-worn watercolour palette, acrylic paint markers, or even cyanotype chemicals—she’s primed to create at a moment’s notice. A self-proclaimed jack-of-all-trades, their practice moves fluidly across materials, often drawing on second-hand finds and objects from the natural world. Donica’s work reminds us that realism doesn’t have to omit mysticism and storytelling.

Kyra Lambert: Tell me a little about your arts practice as currently is and where you tend to draw influence from.

Donica Larade: My process of creating has always been chaotic and unpredictable. Everything in your life has the ability to inspire art, especially the unexpected or mundane. Some concepts creep up and grow slowly over time, and some hit me like a freight train. I’ll be watching a movie or in the grocery store and frantically scribbling something down in my notes app. Sketchbooks then help me flesh ideas out and explore what medium to communicate them with. Themes I’ve been exploring recently involve mythology, philosophy, symbolism, death and natural cycles, local plants and animals, social justice movements, and generally the whimsy of the natural world. 

KL: How does your Chéticamp home base influence your arts perspective and practice? 

DL: Cape Breton is one of the only places I know where being an artist is taken seriously as a career path. Growing up spending time in Chéticamp, I was influenced by theatre productions, musicals, dances, and festivals that showed me art was culturally essential. As a kid, I walked door to door selling my drawings because I felt confident people around me valued art. A mix of wonderful landscapes, island artists, seriously funny people, and a rich culture that celebrates expression has been a winning formula for me.

KL: What pieces of folklore from Cape Breton do you hold close? 

DL: The fairies of Cape Breton Island are the creatures I’m most drawn to in regards to island mythology. The folklore I’ve most heavily focused on in my previous work has explored visual symbolism and tales associated with fairies. Something that compels me most about fairy lore is their presence throughout various communities found on Cape Breton Island, such as the Mi’kmaq, Gaelic, and Acadian people. It’s very telling of their cultural impact and powerful abilities. 

KL: All art, yours especially, “keeps record” of species and stories around our immediate environment. What drew you to this type of art practice?

DL: I think what first drew me to this type of note taking was in part my own discovery and curiosity for the species that lived locally. Observation and pattern recognition is a part of both the scientific and artistic process. I constantly traipse around with my nose inside guidebooks or the apps eBird and iNaturalist. The realization that many people are unaware of some of the amazing species in their own backyard and have that same curiosity pushed me into this style of highlighting them in my art. Flying squirrels, purple coral mushrooms, and saw-whet owls are only some of the incredible, unique species that people might not associate with the East Coast. 

KL: You have a very special ability in connecting people to the wealth of species in their immediate environment. Do you have any stories that come to mind when you think about introducing people to local invertebrates, or mushrooms? (Connecting people to their environment can be so empowering and supports interdependence, accessibility in education through the arts.)

DL: I think it can be difficult to choose one specific memory because of the way it’s completely integrated into my life and daily activities. However, some of my most memorable experiences in scientific communication have been with children. They are the most curious, ask the best questions, and hold the most unbridled joy. In our interactions, I often find myself thinking more creatively, pushing the limits of my own understanding, and being challenged into trying to explain complex genetic theory to an eight-year-old asking about butterflies. It’s incredibly rewarding to support young people on their own journeys of understanding the world around them. 

KL: How do you interact with the wider Nova Scotia arts scene? Where is your place in it? 

DL: Coming from a non-traditional art background has in turn led to a non-traditional relationship with the Nova Scotia art community. At times, I’ve felt isolated as an artist because of my lack of formal education. It can feel difficult to make connections and obtain the right resources without the formal structure that school can offer. Thankfully, living in small artistic towns like Chéticamp, Seaforth, and Antigonish, and taking part in residencies and festivals, has been deeply healing for my imposter syndrome. These experiences, as well as making connections with other artists and mentors, have allowed me to mitigate my feelings of insecurity in my art practice and feel like an essential piece in our art world. It takes all kinds in the arts, and my unique journey and experiences created my own niche in the scene. 

KL: How does art influence ecologically minded spaces? Is there a specific conservation effort in NS you’d like to call attention to? 

DL: Traditionally, art and science have always been entwined in a way in which one was rarely found without the other. Note taking, sketching, or illustrating are an essential resource in the sciences to help convey information. Looking back at extraordinary naturalists like Maria Sibylla Merian, Ernst Haeckel, or Anna Atkins, I think the relationship between science and art was much more widely acknowledged and appreciated before the twenty-first century than it is today. For me, the beauty of illustration and its role in the sciences is to communicate difficult or interesting concepts, advocate on behalf of species and the environment, and celebrate the mysticality of nature. There are too many amazing conservation efforts to mention just one, but CPAWS, Nature Nova Scotia, and the Ecology Action Centre offer great resources for conservation work being done in your area!

In mouth them like words, Angela Henderson welcomes viewers into a space that feels quiet, careful, and a little mysterious. On view at StFX Art Gallery from February 25 to April 4, the exhibition brings together graphite drawings nestled within free-standing wooden structures that subtly shape how you move through the gallery. Her line work shifts between intention and instinct, between the clarity of design and forms that seem to rise up from somewhere harder to name. The installation feels like a living archive, one that asks you to slow your pace, come closer, and spend time with images that do not resolve all at once. In this conversation, she reflects on ambiguity, restraint, and the conditions she creates to allow something unexpected to surface.

Your title, mouth them like words, feels tactile and embodied. Where did that phrase come from?

A lot of the titles I’ve used in the past have come from poetic references—Anne Carson and Forugh Farrokhzad—but not this one.

My partner is a poet, and reading his work influences me. I think I’m inspired by the embodied quality of words on the page—language in any place, really. Lately, a lot of my work has resulted in hybrid forms that are hard to name. I was thinking about the mouth as the place where we speak language. There’s this visceral, mouth-like quality that feels close to naming but also to being unable to name.

If I were to think about a mouthful of ambiguity—how would I name it? I don’t know. That’s kind of where the title comes from.

Many of the forms feel pared down, almost elemental. What draws you to that economy of line?

My background is in design, particularly architectural and spatial design. I’m interested in material quality and structure. Often my drawing practice veers toward the maximal—more and more and more—but the structures that hold those forms feel like metaphysical devices. They’re frameworks that hold ambiguous life forms or images.

There’s a contrast there. The structures are drawings in and of themselves. I imagine them as part of a lifelong system—an ongoing design and development of these forms. They’re members of a kind of evolving structure.

Where did this body of work feel most difficult?

There’s always a lot of fastidiousness in what I do—time spent. In the drawings, especially, I’ve developed a practice that tries to create the conditions for something meditative, where the subconscious can come forward. It becomes about drawing and witnessing what emerges.

That sounds good, but often it’s frustrating. Creating those conditions isn’t always easy. It depends on mood, on the day.

I’m also a parent. There’s guilt—long periods spent alone are when that process becomes most accessible. Sometimes I feel guilty for that. Other times I feel like I’m not spending enough time with myself. It’s a difficult balance.

Do you think of these works as contemporary, or as belonging to a longer timeline of mark-making and symbolic practice?

Both. There’s something pre-verbal in the work. Through the process I described, forms emerge that are hard to name. I relate that to ancient or pre-verbal knowledge.

At the same time, practices like tarot or divination tools project a way forward. They depart from rationalist binaries—right/wrong, good/bad—that we see increasingly in society. There’s hopefulness in ambiguous or mysterious tools. They propose alternative ways of seeing and naming.

How do orientation and scale shape the viewer’s experience?

You have to look at my drawings with dedication. Often your body comes very close to the paper. The viewer is rewarded by spending time.

In this exhibition, I thought about ambulating—about circumambulation, which suggests ritual or spiritual practice. Ambulation isn’t a straight line; it’s circulatory. I also tried to insert my own body into the forms, literally, through scale—heights, widths.

I wanted to create a scaled environment that slows the viewer down and brings them close to the surface.

How does a drawing begin for you? And how do you know it’s finished?

A drawing begins as curiosity or observation. I often work with found forms. I might trace something—blind contour, physical objects, or carbon tracing. The reference point is intuitive, often coming from walking, being in nature, observing trees, leaves, insects—things outside my window.

I’ve also worked with psychoanalytic practice for about eight years. I use tools that access subconscious thought—active imagination, for example. 

I don’t use erasers. The drawing evolves. I follow what emerges.

As for finished, it’s a feeling. When there’s enough depth and complexity, I feel it’s complete.

The works hover between abstraction and something almost legible. Are you interested in that threshold?

Yes. Ambiguity is a goal in my work. I value holding multiple things at once without resolution.

I’m interested in how images unfold and contain many references. I love the work of Marcel Dzama, for example. I feel a trajectory toward identifying figures or reference points that could develop a narrative quality.

How did the installation shape the meaning of the work?

When I installed the show, I realized I had designed the wooden forms to meet and facilitate the drawings. I imagine those structures returning in future exhibitions to house new drawings—like a growing archive.

I was trying to create a quiet archive. The line work and forms reference botanical drawing—the way we archive and document plant or animal life.

Can you speak about your material choices—graphite, coloured pencil, mylar?

Many materials come from my design background. I use CAD for structural designs. The washi paper I work with is incredibly responsive to graphite—it holds it in nuanced ways. At times it feels like a dead end, but it does something specific.

In this show I experimented with watercolour paper in the central form. I’m interested in moving toward tracing papers or translucent materials—where drawing becomes more three-dimensional.

The blue pencil comes from architectural construction lines. When plotted, those lines disappear. They’re subtle construction marks.

There’s quietness in the exhibition, but also tension. How do you think about restraint?

My process can be obsessive, right up until the night before installation. I’m always trying to pare things down.

There’s restraint in how the pieces fit together, the structures that tilt and move, almost like flat-packed furniture.

I grew up in a small closed religious community. Dogma is something I’m embedded with but push against. Restraint sometimes comes from setting rules: no colour, one colour, this paper only. Creating conditions through limitation.

There’s much more work that isn’t in the show than is. Sketches upon sketches—my own archive in manila folders.

Do you think of drawing as a form of divination?

I like that idea. Without erasers, drawing becomes like watching clouds. “Oh, there’s an ear—I’ll follow it.” Sometimes I almost speak to it: Why are you here? What are you showing me?

It may sound strange, but I’m trying to draw from subconscious space. Perhaps even from a collective unconscious—the roots under trees, the mycelium.

The divination, if anything, is about creating conditions for unfolding and then letting it happen. Witnessing and participating while trying to quiet the thinking mind.

Everything begins with close observation—botanical forms, trees, leaves, insects. But once that reference is on the page, it departs. The visible is the starting point. Through process, it becomes post-observational—an unfolding.

Ross Nervig is the Editor of Visual Arts News.