Call for Papers
Micheline Beauchemin, Le Fleuve St. Laurent, n.d., metallic and mixed fibres on board. Gift of Lew Benvenuto in memory of Eleanor Taylor Benvenuto, 2015. Collection of McIntosh Gallery, Western University.
Music, Craft, and the Fibre Arts: Textures in Conversation
We invite proposals for presentations on music-fibre arts intersections for a symposium that forms part of a 3-day festival, Music, Craft, and the Fibre Arts: Textures in Conversation, to be held at Western University in London, Ontario (Canada), September 18–20, 2026.
An Iranian carpet weaver sings to her colleagues to communicate the textile’s design; an African-American quiltmaker describes "off-beat patterns" and "multiple rhythms" in her complex fabric masterpiece; a Canadian classical composer imitates the spinning of wool in her piano music as a feminist tribute to women’s work in centuries past. For each, music and the fibre arts are in fruitful artistic conversation.
Despite this, these interdisciplinary creative interactions, which often happen outside the arts’ patriarchal mainstream, remain under-studied and under-theorized by both visual arts and music scholars, while the artists and musicians working at this intersection rarely have the opportunity to come together and discuss what it means to place these artforms in dialogue in their work.
Our 3-day festival-symposium Music, Craft, and the Fibre Arts: Textures in Conversation will bring together visual artists, crafters, musicians, and scholars for conversations about how the disciplines of music, crafting, and the fibre arts speak to one another. The event will feature performances and community crafting activities alongside a 2-day academic symposium. This will facilitate conversation not only amongst an interdisciplinary group of scholars, but also with a group of North American artists, Indigenous and settler, who consider the fibre arts and music in tandem.
Proposed 20-minute presentations can explore any aspect of music-fibre arts interactions, especially their overlapping technical or social elements, and can come from scholars and artists in any discipline and at any career stage. We welcome submissions pertaining to any historical period, geographic location, or cultural context, and especially welcome proposals foregrounding Indigenous, African and Asian Diasporic, Latinx, and/or Global South perspectives.
Possible topics might include:
- Music or textile art that combines the two artforms or draws inspiration from specific elements of the other.
- The employment of textile-based models to understand musical structures, including the use of textile metaphors in musical analysis.
- The role of musical metaphors in the fibre arts and crafting.
- The physical and digital implications of parallels between musical scores and textile patterns.
- The role of the tactile in artistic processes.
- Scraps, patchwork, re-assemblage, re-using, and re-mixing materials.
- Music and crafting as domestic "women’s work"; engaging feminist themes through music-craft intersections.
- Music-craft collaborations and combinations focused on political engagement; "craftivism."
- Translating craft practices into sound to create accessibility tools and accessible instruments.
- Use of music and textiles together for cultural communication or to build collective memory.
- The pursuit of well-being through craft and music; therapeutic/post-traumatic interventions.
- Technology and wearable computing as tools for embodied music-craft interaction.
Submit Abstract
Deadline for 300-word abstract submissions: June 15, 2026. Decisions will be communicated by the end of June.
Please feel free to email Alyssa Cottle at acottle2@uwo.ca with any questions.
Organizers
Emily Abrams Ansari, Associate Professor of Music, Western University
Alyssa Cottle, Postdoctoral Fellow in Music, Western University
Tricia Johnson, Assistant Professor, Visual Arts, Western University
Sheri Nault, Assistant Professor, Visual Arts, Western University
Kristen Wallentinsen, Assistant Professor of Music Theory, Rutgers University
Contact
Alyssa Cottle
Postdoctoral Fellow
acottle2@uwo.ca
