Anne Low, Dream Meadow, 2023

Dream Meadow, 2023, is a textile-based sculpture made by the artist Anne Low (b. 1981) in her former studio on Denman Island in British Columbia. The work comprises a long skirt and pocketed apron with attached adornments. The striped textiles used to create the skirt and its lining were handwoven by the artist on a loom with hand-dyed wool and silk, using eighteenth- and nineteenth-century weaving techniques and historic patterns.

Attached to the skirt is the white apron, made from linen also handwoven by the artist. Low’s decision to make her own materials is a political one. The slowness of handweaving is a radical act in our harried period of late capitalism, requiring the artist’s deep and intimate devotion to a practice that often goes unappreciated in contemporary life. Hanging from the skirt are a metal knife, a photocopied image of a tree, a match strike pad, half a nutshell, a sprig of horsetail, three silk handkerchiefs, and other found and crafted elements.

The empty skirt, displayed on a wall, suggests the ghostly trace of women of the past, memorializing the pre-industrial weavers who laboured to produce textiles on looms before the advent of mechanical weaving. The work pays homage also to the pioneering settler women who performed gruelling manual labour on farms and homesteads in Canada and farther afield, whose contributions are often lost in time, undocumented and unacknowledged.

Dream Meadow, 2023, was acquired with the generous support of Katherine Graham-Debost.