Soft Systems: Radical Matters

Tristesse Seeliger

April 24 to May 23, 2026

“Over the past two and a half years, weaving has reshaped how I approach painting. The handwoven canvas is not a passive support but an active ground. My process moves through a shared vocabulary of steps—dyeing warp threads, weaving, cutting, sewing and painting—though not every work follows each stage. Some pieces begin with dyed threads, allowing colour relationships to emerge through the interlacing of fibres, with chromatic blending happening through the eye’s perception of adjacency rather than mixed pigment. Working with colour this way—as a painter through a weaver's logic—has led me to combinations that feel genuinely new. Other works forgo dyeing, or remain unsewn, the woven surface meeting paint directly. 

In pieces that incorporate sewing, the cloth is cut, folded and stitched before paint touches the surface. Seams become drawing. Structure becomes texture. The cut edge, the folded plane and the sewn line generate formal elements similar to a brushstroke. When paint arrives, it responds to a surface already dense with decisions—the woven ground as underpainting, as the first visual layer, as a structure and colour system. I can follow the grid of the warp and weft or work against it in a gestural manner. 

What draws me to this layered slow process is what it asks me to reckon with. There is a moment, particularly before painting begins, when the cloth can feel humble, easily overlooked—an anonymous support for something else. Yet it is precisely this familiarity, this quiet ubiquity of fabric in daily life, that I want to hold up to the light. Handwoven cloth is not simple; it is our closeness to it that makes it seem so. These works aim to honour the rigour and intimacy embedded in textiles, and to question the hierarchies between art and craft, background and foreground, the ordinary and the extraordinary. The process is radical in the most material sense: slow, deliberate and increasingly rare in a world where handweaving has largely been replaced by machines.

Central to this work is the mentorship of two women who have each spent years holding their disciplines with the eyes of artists: Sandra Crompton, my weaving teacher of the past two and a half years, and Nina Ho, seamstress and sewing educator, whose guidance is newer but no less formative. Working alongside them has taught me to resist the pressure for speed, to find possibility within the constraints of a single technique, and to recognize that women’s material practices, even now, remain undervalued and undersung. This work exists in conversation with that lineage.”

Tristesse Seeliger is a Vancouver-based artist and educator whose current work explores abstraction as expressed through weaving and painting. Using textiles, geometric form and gestural mark-making, she treats the grid as a foundational structure—approaching weaving as a lens to examine art, craft and the cultural forces that shape what is made visible or kept unseen. Grounded in research and hands-on experimentation, her practice moves fluidly between studio work and the broader material and conceptual questions that weaving continues to raise. Seeliger holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and a Professional Development Program credential from Simon Fraser University. Her work has been exhibited across Canada, including recent solo and feature presentations with Vancouver Art Gallery Art Rental & Sales and Propellor Gallery, with upcoming exhibitions at Gallery Jones and Deluge Contemporary. She has also taken part in invitational and public-art projects with Douglas Coupland, Westbank Corp, Vancouver Mural Festival and Burrard Arts Foundation, as well as group exhibitions in Vancouver, Whistler and Oakland. Her work has appeared in Wired UK, Geist, SAD Mag and Duct Tape Magazine. She has completed residencies at A / Z West and MakerLabs, and regularly takes part in talks and collaborative projects about art and process. 

Tristesse will present an artist talk about her practice and exhibition Soft Systems: Radical Matters at Deluge Contemporary on Saturday, May 23rd at 2pm. The artist will be present from 2–4pm on that, the final day of the exhibition.