Kasie Campbell

Moquettes by Kasie Campbell and the late Ginette Lund (mum)

Matrilineal Threads: Kasie Campbell in collaboration with Ginette Lund with the support from the Edmonton Arts Council

Matrilineal Threads is a performative sculptural installation created by Kasie Campbell in collaboration with her mother, Ginette Lund. Consisting of large sculptures and a bodysuit, the work explores Campbell’s relationship with her mother and the ways women relate to themselves in respect to their mothers. Working distantly from Edmonton and Grande Prairie, respectively, Campbell and her mother use thread, yarn, nylon batting, and textiles as an embrace of Lund’s aptitude for crochet and interrogation of the link between gender, craft, domesticity and tradition. The body is central to these works, as crochet emerges from the artists’ bodies and subsequently renders the works flesh-like in their own right. The sculptures’ crocheted skin and orifices, and textile appendages simultaneously draw familiar comfort and uncanny unease. Campbell’s performance, donning the bodysuit she created with her mother, further evokes the provocative collaborative potential of traditional women’s craft and experiences shares as mothers and daughters. The extra contextual layers woven into this project are unavoidable: Lund beat the odds battling lupus for 35 years, passing in May 2018. She worked tirelessly with Campbell, determined to continue despite her pervasive cancer, despite needing carpal tunnel surgery in both hands – in Campbell’s words, “If that isn’t a testimony to women’s strength and the power of art, I don’t know what is.” ​

Although a person’s passing can never be timely, Campbell considers herself lucky to have collaborated on this project with her mother, and is content that Lund’s name will tour beside her own for three years, even though she is gone.

At Risk by Kasie Campbell and the late Ginette Lund (Mum, I miss you)

This slideshow of images credited to The Works Art and Design Festival in Edmonton AB.