From her home studio in Saskatoon, Kaija Sanelma Harris (1939-2022) created breathtaking textile works that brilliantly conveyed her love of colour, texture, nature and light. She was an artist who both innovated the technical processes of weaving and pushed its aesthetic potential far beyond the limits of functionality. Her lifetime of work is a testament to her profound dedication and industriousness, effortlessly fusing the concerns of fine art and craft.
Kaija Sanelma Harris: Warp & Weft, a collaboration between Remai Modern and the Saskatchewan Craft Council, showcases the late artist’s work across two venues. In recognition of the complementary missions of the two organizations, SCC’s exhibition highlights the creative, personal, and technical shifts in Kaija’s extraordinary work, while Remai Modern’s exhibition situates her within the context of visual art history.
In western art history, work labelled as craft spent considerable time being viewed as lesser-than or “low” art when compared to the fine art being produced at the same time (predominantly by men). Patriarchal and colonial attitudes contributed to this division, which has only begun to change in recent decades.
Harris touched on this in a 2003 interview with Sheila Robertson for the SCC’s Craft Factor Magazine.
“She maintains that weaving is a feminist issue since, over the millennia, it has been largely executed by women, and taught to their daughters. She has read about wealthy, male explorers such as Heinrich Schliemann, the British archeologist who found Troy. These men were seeking gold and other precious objects. ‘Remnants of ancient weaving were not of interest to them, because weaving was women’s work. They discarded the fibres they found,’ ” Robertson wrote, quoting Harris, in her profile of the artist.
It’s taken nearly 100 years for that to change. A 2024 article on Artsy’s Editorial page talks about shifting attitudes around weaving in the western context.
“Finally, like photography or ceramics, weaving has shed the often pejoratively used labels of ‘craft’ or ‘applied art’ and is getting its due in the canon of fine art,” Elizabeth Fazzare writes.
To view Harris’s work, is to see an artist who was technically masterful but also captures, in poetic fashion, her love of the landscape and her connection to her home country of Finland and her adopted home in Saskatchewan.
“If I could design the landscape I would like to live in, it would have a view of the North American prairie on one side of the house, and on the other that of Nordic forests as well as Iceland…the impossible dream.”
- Kaija Sanelma Harris
Connections to the art community
Though she was deeply and enthusiastically connected to Saskatchewan’s craft community, Harris was also influenced by her counterparts in mediums outside of textile and by the evolving styles in the larger art world.
“Harris’s approach to textiles was grounded in the conceptual underpinnings of visual art as much as in the processes and materials of craft,” curator Michelle Jacques writes in the exhibition’s text panels.
“Because Saskatoon is a small community and there weren’t many other weavers, my attention was drawn more to painting. It was a period of painting I could identify with, particularly the work of Otto Rogers. I especially liked his paintings where the image appeared to have been brought in and deposited on the canvas by a gentle wind.”
- Kaija Sanelma Harris in an interview with George Moppett, Kaija Sanelma Harris: Tapestries 1990–1993, Mendel Art Gallery, 1993.
Remai Modern’s presentation of Warp & Weft includes a painting by Otto Rogers in honour of this friendship.
Though she was surrounded and inspired by art of all mediums, she was committed to art of weaving. She didn’t want her works to look like paintings. Instead, she was driven to push the limits of the medium and was eager to experiment.
In hindsight, it’s easy to say Harris — whose career spanned some 40 years starting in the 1970s — was ahead of her time, but she didn’t seem preoccupied by such notions.
“She is intent on creating work that is not only innovative, but solid and durable” Robertson wrote in her Craft Factor profile of the artist. “Not for her [are] the conceptual pieces that are long on ideas but short on craftsmanship. To her, where and how a piece will be hung and how it will be maintained are as important as the design and construction phases.”
Learn more:
- Globe & Mail: In the museum world, textiles are hot as curators look to showcase the work of women
- frieze: The Artificial Divide Between Fine Art and Textiles is a Gendered Issue
- Artsy: Why the Art World Is Embracing Craft
- Ted-Ed: Is there a difference between art and craft? – Laura Morelli
About Kaija Sanelma Harris: Warp & Weft
Kaija Sanelma Harris: Warp and Weft is presented across two venues: Remai Modern and the Saskatchewan Craft Council (SCC), located at 813 Broadway Avenue, Saskatoon.
Together, these exhibitions tell the story of one of Canada’s most important textile artists. Both venues include works from all decades of Harris’s career, as well as preparatory drawings, fibre studies, and archival materials.
Remai Modern’s exhibition runs from September 28, 2024 to March 9, 2025 and is curated by Michelle Jacques, Remai Modern’s Head of Exhibitions & Collections/Chief Curator. The SCC’s exhibition runs from October 12, 2024 to February 8, 2025 and is curated by Steph Canning and Maia Stark.