In Calling, Saskatchewan artist Hanna Yokozawa Farquharson combined Japanese aesthetic principles with close observation of the Canadian prairie landscape.
Curated by the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery and shown at the Kerry Vickar Centre in 2022, the exhibition presented meditative fibre works shaped by the artist’s movement between countries, professions and environments.
From architectural design to fibre
Before settling in Saskatchewan, Yokozawa Farquharson worked in Japan in digital architecture and landscape design, with particular attention to stone. Her textile practice retained that concern for structure, surface and the relationship between designed form and natural material.
In Saskatchewan, she found subjects in hoar frost, tree rings, moss, prairie grasses, stars and the changing cycles of the moon. These observations were translated into abstract patterns and quilted textures rather than literal landscape images.
Community, memory and imperfection
Works such as Circles referred to the links between family, community and the wider world. A group titled Shells and Fossils drew on childhood memories of her mother and treasures collected from the sea.
The exhibition’s restrained forms and attention to texture reflected the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which locates beauty in imperfection, impermanence and material variation. Chance was not treated as a flaw to remove, but as part of the work’s character.
Calling brought together memories of Japan and experiences of Saskatchewan without presenting either place as fixed. Fibre became a medium through which landscapes, cultural knowledge and personal relationships could overlap.
The exhibition showed how migration can generate a visual language built from more than one environment, with familiar aesthetic principles reshaped by new light, weather and terrain.