Betty Wood (Toronto, ON)
East-End Relections, 2024. Needle punched and hand-hooked hand-dyed natural wool fibers, recycled cotton, recycled leather, and acrylic yarn on cloth. 48 x 48”.
Bio
Betty Wood (b. Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1986) is a queer, Toronto-based fibre artist. Betty spent nearly 15 years working as a design and arts journalist and editor before transitioning to rug hooking, embroidery, and punch needle during the pandemic. Her self-taught practice is rooted in art history and gender studies, producing large-scale tapestries that document queer domesticity and joy. Betty’s unique ‘slow art’ focuses on the experience of making, drawing on her role observing and commenting on the world of art and design to create comforting textiles that have a painterly feel. She uses a combination of hand tools to create her larger-than-life scenes that play with ideas of domesticity, scale, and the urban landscape. Betty’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Toronto, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Youngstown.
Artist Statement
The domestic sphere has long been seen as a “feminine” space, with needlecraft and textile arts often denied a gallery setting. Betty’s work engages with this prejudice by treating fibres in a painterly fashion and playfully transposing snapshots of private, domestic spaces into public settings to charge them with new meaning. Betty’s textile works celebrate quiet resistance, queer homemaking, joy and the nostalgia of memory. Using a mix of hand hooking, needle punch and embroidery techniques, Betty “sketches with yarn”, rooting her practice of “slow art” in repetition and imagination, capturing lost and transient spaces. Part of a series, Still, Life, begun during the recent pandemic and encompassing spaces across the Atlantic - the works also read as a love letter to 20th century furniture design and biophilia, with plants taking on the role of protagonist, East-End Reflections adds the family cats to the quiet domestic dramas.