Les Hookeuses du Bor'de'lo - Our Latest Art Project

First loops of Forty Fathoms  
( Patricia Winans in collaboration with Claude Roussel ©)

Les Hookeuses du Bor'de'lo  (of which I am a proud member!)  are a group of twenty New Brunswick women  who share friendship and a passion for traditional rug hooking. We come from various backgrounds as artists, some are professionals and others have a long history of being accomplished artisans in a variety of mediums.

Our exhibitions always have a theme and as well as the individual works, we have begun to include a group piece as part of the shows. In February, 2013 we launched Les hookeuses  s'ecartent  in Gallery 12 at the Aberdeen Cultural Center in Moncton. Here, the center piece of the show was a mural made up of hooked individual pieces which were put together on the wall like a jigsaw puzzle. The original design for the mural was done as a group process with each person making a contribution to the final design.

La mosaïque/The Mosaic    Les Hookeuses du Bor'de'lo 2013 ©

Our newest art project, entitled Les Hookeuses du Bor'de'lo & Roussel, will be show cased at the Congrés mondial acadien 2014 (World Acadian Congress 2014) later this year in August at the Université de Moncton, Edmunston, NB Campus.

All of the pieces in this show are inspired by works done by Claude Roussel, an accomplished Acadian Canadian artist and sculptor who in 1963 taught the first academic courses in art at the Université de Moncton. This was the beginning of the founding of the Fine Arts Department in 1972 at the university.

With the gracious collaboration of Roussel, we each chose a piece of his original work to interpret as well as choosing a section of one of his paintings that we are again going to assemble as a mosaic.

The painting I chose to interpret is a Roussel seascape and I call it Forty Fathoms. Some of the gals are finished already - I have made a healthy start on it - wish me luck!