The Gift of Vacancy – Heather Kehoe
The Gift of Vacancy – Heather Kehoe
The Gift of Vacancy is an embroidery series that reimagines historic portraits of women. The women in the portraits are silhouetted by richly embroidered backgrounds based on historic patterns. The patterns are sources from the Victoria & Albert Museum’s online collection of textile fragments, wallpaper prints, and design samples.
Through this five-year project, I was questioning who is and isn’t included in western art history. The vacancy created by the silhouettes speaks to how little we may know about the subject of the portraits even if we’ve seen them so often. This gap of understanding is particularly striking when you consider that being painted was one of the few ways women could enter the gallery space, as they were excluded from European academies due to gender discrimination. The artistic work women could access was often devalued as domestic handicrafts and omitted from historic study.
It’s only recently that museums, galleries, and institutions have revisited domestic and decorative arts, but the decades of exclusion are still felt. As I researched the patterns for this project, I was startled to see how many of the designs had no known maker. Those that were credited were credited solely to designers or design houses. Who made these objects? I will likely never know who made the textiles or wallpaper fragments that inspired these pieces. But do I really know who made the portraits? Even masterpieces are the result of collective labour, not singular genius. Apprentices painted the backgrounds, workshop assistants prepared the materials, models held poses for hours. How do we decide what labour is worth crediting? The Gift of Vacancy is thus a statement of incomplete appreciation for the beauty created by unnamed and unknown artists who have shaped design sensibilities throughout the decades.
Heather Kehoe is a multidisciplinary research-based artist. Her current practice is centred around using embroidery as a research method and rhetorical device. Heather graduated from the University of Calgary with a BFA Honours in Visual Studies. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions such as Arts Commons, cSPace King Edward, Calgary Central Library, and the Alberta Craft Council. She is a member of Contextural Fibre Arts Cooperative. She is currently based out of Lethbridge.
Date:April 5th, 2025 - May 30th, 2025
Location:Casa - Project Space
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