We learn early how to behave in an art gallery. Keep a respectful distance. Keep your hands to yourself. Above all, do not touch the art.

TACTILE asks visitors to unlearn that behaviour.

Bringing together seven artists selected from an open call that received submissions from 70 artists, TACTILE presents works that are intended to be touched, held, manipulated and physically encountered. Here, touch is not simply permitted. It is necessary.

Throughout the exhibition, visitors are invited to unzip, turn, rub, hold, press, lean, embrace and play. These actions reveal aspects of the work that looking alone cannot. A surface gives way to something hidden beneath it. An apparently familiar object behaves differently than expected. A ceramic form becomes a puzzle. A soft sculpture asks to be wrapped around the body. A visitor presses against an object or positions their body in relation to another.

In each case, physical interaction becomes a way of knowing.

Touch is among our most immediate ways of understanding the world. Long before we learn the conventions of museums and galleries, we reach for things. We assess weight, texture, temperature, resistance, softness and fragility through our bodies. We learn what an object is, and what it might do, by handling it. Yet within the gallery, this fundamental form of knowledge is usually removed from the experience of art.

The works in TACTILE restore that possibility while considering what else might happen when the distance between viewer and artwork disappears. Touch can be playful or comforting, but it can also make us vulnerable. It can evoke intimacy, memory, empathy, discomfort and care. It can expose the limits of our assumptions about an object and make us newly conscious of our own bodies.

The exhibition also complicates the distinction between touching an artwork and using it. Many of these works borrow from objects we ordinarily understand through physical interaction: ceramics, textiles, soap, furniture, tools and other familiar forms. Their functions, however, have been altered, exaggerated, interrupted or reinvented. Visitors are asked not simply to put a hand on an artwork, but to discover what their own physical participation might reveal.

There is risk in this exchange. Objects may change through repeated handling. Surfaces may record contact. Materials may wear. Rather than treating these possibilities solely as damage to be prevented, TACTILE considers what it means for an artwork to accumulate evidence of encounter.

In a culture increasingly experienced through screens, TACTILE insists upon the value of direct physical experience. It asks what becomes possible when we encounter art not only with our eyes and intellect, but with our hands, our bodies and our curiosity.

Please touch the art.

TACTILE is co-curated by Shannon Pawliw and Sophia Crompton, a fourth-year Art History student at McGill University.

MEDIUMS

textiles, basketry, used hair brushes, artist’s hair, wool, beads, ceramic, plastic resin, oil on canvas

ARTIST BIOS

Natasha Bakas (she/her) is a Vancouver based multi-disciplinary artist working in ceramics, painting and collage. She studied visual arts at Langara’s Fine Arts Program and Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Natasha’s practice is routed in fostering dialogue about contemporary society. Her figurative work explores the rawness of the human body and facets of the mind. She expresses an interest in the relationship between thoughts, feelings and behaviours from both an emotional and scientific viewpoint, and seeks to communicate themes of common humanity.

K8L35 is the collaborative practice of Vancouver artists Kate MacDonald and Les Sears. Working across sculpture, assemblage, installation and mixed media, the pair transforms familiar objects through unexpected shifts in material, colour, context and function.

Their constructions frequently begin with ordinary cultural or utilitarian forms—including food, packaging, trophies, architectural models and street objects—and push them toward the absurd, uncanny or strangely monumental. Bright colour, altered found objects, resin and visual humour provide immediate points of entry while raising questions about value, consumption, aspiration and the meanings attached to everyday things.

Recent projects include RKT ASSMBLY, a commissioned construction for Fabric Living combining an architectural development model with altered Georgie Award trophies, acrylic and extreme matte-black paint. MacDonald and Sears bring distinct artistic practices to the collaboration, using K8L35 as a space for material experimentation, shared invention and ambitious object-making. They have shared a studio in Vancouver since 2013.

K8L35 is the collaborative practice of Vancouver artists Kate MacDonald and Les Sears. Working across sculpture, assemblage, installation and mixed media, the pair transforms familiar objects through unexpected shifts in material, colour, context and function. Their constructions often begin with ordinary cultural forms—domestic objects, food, architectural models, trophies or decorative materials—and push

K8L35 transforms familiar objects through saturated colour, cast resin and absurd changes in function. The three submitted works are designed to be activated by the audience rather than experienced solely through sight. Each invites a recognizable physical action—sorting, turning or washing—while frustrating the object’s expected purpose.

Kate Metten’s distinctive creations have been featured at Vancouver Art Gallery, Polygon Gallery, Wil Aballe Art Projects, and the Museum of Vancouver, as well as internationally through Simons Fabrique 1840, NCECA, and British Vogue. Recipient of the 2023 Judson Beaumont BC Achievement Award in Applied Art and Design, Metten continues to explore the threshold between utility and art — where a mug becomes a conversation, and a vessel becomes a field of light, colour, and meaning.

Kate Metten works at the intersection of painting and ceramics, blurring material hierarchies with formal abstraction. Her practice moves fluidly between the studio and the exhibition space, balancing a body of contemporary artwork with a line of hand-thrown tableware that redefines the rituals of everyday use. Rooted in West Coast Modernism and informed by years of material research, Metten’s ceramics are both functional and sculptural — vessels that embody precision, rhythm, and touch. Each piece reflects her commitment to the handmade as a form of quiet resistance to mass production and disposability by incorporating site specific materials as a gesture reflecting on the politics of land use. The ceramics submitted were originally shown in 2018 at Nanaimo Art Gallery; Kinetic link is designed to be held and played like a puzzle, allowing visitors to move a ceramic ball through the interior course of the vessel. The second submission, Care & Protection reflects on the physicality of working as a full time potter and the spheres on the wall correlate to injuries I have from throwing clay, inviting visitors to press their backs into the pressure point themselves. Neither of these works have ever been shown in Vancouver! So much of how we understand ceramics involves engagement and handling; these works push the boundaries of wheel throwing into a conceptual realm by inventing new functions for the vessel.

Anne Steves is a Welsh/Canadian multi-disciplinary artist working on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Her work engages with thread-based media, photography and eco-biography to address the question “How might we relate here?”

Steves received a BFA in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and an MFA in Studio Practices from the University of Victoria. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and the UK and her practice gas received funding through provincial and federal grants. Anne has participated in the Canadian Craft Biennial residency, the Salt Spring National Art Prize and the NOVA Young Welsh Artist exhibition.

Steves is a Welsh/Canadian multidisciplinary artist living in the small community of Cumberland on Vancouver Island. In her practice, I make craft-based objects that are portals for empathy connections with communities, species, and landscapes other than her own. By working with materials associated with the home (wool rugs, textiles, found thrift store items) she seeks to make spaces where difficult questions can be asked in comfort. At the heart of all her projects lies the question “How might we relate here?”

Asma Sultana is a Toronto-based South Asian interdisciplinary diasporic artist whose practice explores identity, migration, memory, and the physical and cultural ramifications of climate change. Informed by her experiences across Bangladesh, England, and Canada, her research-based work bridges personal and ancestral histories with contemporary concerns.

Sultana frequently uses her own hair as both material and metaphor, employing it as thread to stitch memory into textiles and objects. Carrying her DNA, the hair transforms each work into an intimate form of self-portraiture. The processes of collecting, cleaning, and sewing become rituals of care that reflect cycles of loss, migration, healing, and renewal.

Her practice draws particularly from the Bengali Nakshi Kantha embroidery tradition, connecting contemporary artmaking with her Bangladeshi roots, matrilineal lineage, and the cultural symbolism of hair. Through these materials and processes, Sultana considers how fragments of personal and collective experience can be preserved and transformed.

Trained in Fine Arts and Art History in Bangladesh, England, and Canada, Sultana has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally. Her work has been featured in print and digital media and is held in numerous private collections.

Dr. WhiteFeather Hunter is a Canadian artist-researcher whose interdisciplinary practice spans bioart, biotechnology, textiles, performance, and feminist technoscience. She is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Simon Fraser University and a Visiting Artist-Researcher with the Braid MSC Discovery and Innovation Lab in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. Working across laboratory and craft traditions, her practice explores how embodied forms of making can challenge dominant narratives surrounding biology, gender, ecology, and technological innovation. Through textiles, sculpture, performance, living materials, and speculative design, Hunter investigates touch, repair, intimacy, and the politics of care as critical modes of knowledge production. Her work has been exhibited internationally and presented at conferences spanning contemporary art, science, and technology. She holds a PhD in Biological Art from SymbioticA at The University of Western Australia. Alongside her artistic practice, Hunter writes on feminist bioart, research-creation, and material epistemologies, and is currently completing The Witch in the Lab Coat, a book examining biotechnology through feminist craft practices. Her work invites audiences to reconsider how bodies, materials, and technologies are understood through direct encounter, proposing touch as a vital means of knowing and relating.

Anna Dimoff is the tailor and artist behind Solid Proof Studio – Alterations, Repair and Sewing Service. By mending, reshaping, and refining garments, she helps clients reconnect with their wardrobes and move away from disposable fashion culture. Beyond the work she does with clients, her textile art practice has expanded from wearable pieces to soft sculptures. Anna’s new works of soft sculpture have offered her a space to loosen the rules in a playful exploration of fabric and form, breaking away from the controlled, detail-oriented tailoring practice.