upcoming
Amanda Wood
Radiant Fractures
October 3–November 8, 2025
Sylvie Bélanger Gallery
Opening Reception: October 3, 7–10pm
Artist Tour: October 4, 12pm
Radiant Fractures is a study in divergence—of patterns that repeat, fracture, and radiate across woven and printed surfaces. Through hand weaving and printmaking, the work explores how structure embodies both order and disruption, transforming repetition into an act of resistance rather than a means of resolution.
At the center of this inquiry is the pixelated pomegranate: an ancient symbol rendered as a digital abstraction, fragmented and repeated across materials. Once a fruit of mythology and consequence—linked to thresholds, and transformation—it becomes a modular code, a point of departure from which patterns radiate, mutate, and diverge. Its form is stripped to minimal geometry, then reassembled through texture, and process.
The pixel operates as a conceptual thread across media—a building block, a rupture, a language. Patterns emerge and collapse, diverge from the source image, or shift through scale and material logic. The grid is stretched and disrupted, no longer a framework of control but a field of instability. Ornament becomes counter-code: not decorative, but structural, signaling shifts in perception and meaning.
Layered data sets—thicknesses of yarn, densities of ink, dual weave structures, unexpected materials—move between convergence and contradiction. These materials hold tension: between body and machine, past and present, legibility and distortion. Weaving and printmaking become parallel systems of translation, where fidelity is secondary to sensation, and repetition is a form of rupture.
Slowness, tactility, and labor are embedded in every surface. Repeated fragments—abstracted, glitched, and multiplied—invite close attention. What initially appears ordered may dissolve into dissonance. The pixel, the pomegranate, the pattern: all become unstable sites of meaning.
This is a practice of seeing and not seeing—of finding clarity in divergence. A gesture toward decolonizing space-time through fractured structures and interrupted rhythms. An invitation to stay with the fragment, to read beyond the surface, and to consider how systems can be both patterned and broken, radiant and ruptured.
Pattern, Pixels and Pomegranates
Artist Tour with Amanda Wood
October 4, 12pm
Join Amanda Wood for a guided tour of the exhibition Radiant Fractures. In this artist-led walk through the gallery, Amanda will share insights into the concepts behind her work and the connections between her hand weaving and printmaking practices. Together, we will explore the ways pattern can be both a structure that supports and a space for disruption and transformation.
Participants will also be among the first to experience To See and Not See—an interactive installation that will evolve throughout the exhibition. As part of this experience, attendees will be invited to explore frottage, a technique of creating rubbings by placing paper over textured surfaces and marking it with a drawing tool, revealing pattern combinations that will become part of a larger installation.
Amanda Wood is an interdisciplinary artist based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations (Vancouver, BC). She works across tactile media, including hand weaving and printmaking – layering, translating, and repeating. Amanda attends to what is easily missed, like commonplace materials, eroded fragments, underside textures, gathering meaning from the overlooked.
Amanda’s multi-ethnic, neurodivergent background, which is shaped by complex family histories, deeply informs her connection to liminal space. With ancestral ties to both colonized and colonizer lineages in Trinidad and Mennonite settler histories in North America, her work emerges from a tangle of belonging and displacement, rupture and repair. Rather than offering a single story, she builds a dispersed network of memory and relation—an archipelago of experience.
Influenced by Édouard Glissant’s concept of archipelagic thinking, she approaches her work through a poetics of relation—moving laterally, embracing fragmentation, and listening for how meaning accumulates without hierarchy.
Within this context, hand weaving and printmaking speak to one another—both tactile, repetitive practices rooted in rhythm, memory, and mark-making. Each builds meaning through layering, holding both structure and softness, precision and irregularity. Together, they offer parallel forms of translation: fragmentary, embodied, and capable of carrying language, silence, and accumulated time.
Amanda’s work resists containment, moving between body and mind, digital and tactile, structure and gesture. Rather than seeking resolution, she prioritizes resonance—inviting the viewer to dwell at the edge of knowing, where attention becomes understanding.
Amanda has exhibited across Canada, with recent solo and two-person shows at THIS Gallery (Vancouver), the fifty fifty arts collective (Victoria), and the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art (Kelowna). Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions across Canada. She is a recipient of multiple Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council grants and is currently a finalist in the Salt Spring National Art Prize (2025). Amanda holds a Textile Arts Diploma from Capilano University and a BA from Simon Fraser University.
Amanda Wood acknowledges support from the Superframe Framing Fund.
Images:
1. Amanda Wood, Radiant Fractures (detail), 2025, handwoven cotton, 24x36”.
2. Amanda Wood, Becoming Through Encounters (detail), 2025, pomegranate ink on cotton rag paper, 22x30”.
3. Amanda Wood, Radiant Fractures, 2025, digital drawing adapted from a historical coverlet weave draft by Mary Meigs Atwater (1928), variable dimensions.
4. Amanda Wood, Radiant Fractures, 2025, digital drawing adapted from a historical coverlet weave draft by Mary Meigs Atwater (1928), variable dimensions.
5. Amanda Wood, All That We Are Made Of (detail), 2025, handwoven cotton, drycleaning pins, variable dimensions.
Photos: Amanda Wood.