Hold Fast 2025
Roundup by Craig Francis Power
Against the backdrop of a certain End Times tension in the hazy air—the smell of woodsmoke suffusing the entirety of downtown St. John’s—your intrepid arts reporter was lucky enough to ease some of his Emergency Preparedness Anxiety with a trip to Eastern Edge Gallery’s 2025 incarnation of its Hold Fast Festival, an event whose name, most unfortunately for us all, has taken on an acutely pertinent meaning these last several years.
Friday afternoon brought Khadija Aziz’s mirrored embroidery workshop at East Coast Quilt Co. on Water Street. A textile artist from Toronto by way of Pakistan, Aziz led a packed room through the rudiments of certain basic embroidery stitches devised to most elegantly and efficiently embed small discs of mirror in place on the fabric she provided, all the while describing how no serious discussion of textile work, whether in Canada or in Pakistan or anywhere, can take place without acknowledgment of the craft’s ties (no pun intended) to the history of women’s often unacknowledged and underpaid labour.
While contemporary art in recent years in the United States and Canada has seen an explosive reengagement with the hand-made and the re-emergence of a plethora of “forgotten” craft practices that seek to critique the West’s throw-away culture, its fast fashion, and its mass produced consumer goods, I was surprised to hear Aziz say that back home in Pakistan, hand craft is not a career that people pursue anymore, because it’s underpaid and undervalued.
Be that as it may, even as a textile artist myself, I was gobsmacked at the difficulty in pulling off a simple, half-way decent blanket stitch, and before long found myself lagging behind the rest of the class, struggling to thread a needle, or tie a knot. More impressive even than Aziz’s considerable teaching skills however was her installation I saw the next day at Harbourside Park as part of Hold Fast’s Art Crawl. Entitled “Mirroring the Land Mirroring Ourselves,” the work consists of a series of embroidered banners affixed with numerous, variously sized mirrors, arranged so that for a viewer to look at a particular piece, their own face, and the surrounding landscape—the harbour, the South Side Hills, the bright, smoky sky—can be seen as embedded within the fabric upon the mirror’s surface: we are what we make, we are what we consider.
Further up Water Street, closer to Eastern Edge, set to the Southern Gothic sounds of The Lost and Found musical troupe meandering along the pedestrian mall, St. Michael’s Printshop had set up a small press for lino-cut prints, while Jessie Donaldson, nearby at a fold-out table near the storefront of Johnny Ruth—where “On Foot,” an installation of her ink renderings on wood panels were on display—was hard at work on a large-scale panel of gesture drawings as dozens and dozens of tourists strolled slowly by. Even in the open air, under the blistering sun, there were plenty of N95 masks to be seen, a certain undercurrent of anxiety as people stopped to check things out, bought things, ate ice cream, watched the sky.
Round the corner, into the cool vault of the Lawnya Vawnya offices, the artist known as Oz (B. G-Osborne) had set up a kind of “chill room” in the dim space. Entitled “how does it sound how does it feel,” Oz created a kind of pulsing ambient soundtrack, pumping the music directly from their laptop into a series of speakers set at intervals around the room. Visitors were invited to hold one or several large, inflated balloons to the speaker’s surface, feeling the sometimes subtle, sometimes more percussive sounds pulse through their hands, through their chests and stomachs, and, in my ten year-old daughter’s case, her head.
Coming out of Oz’s installation, we caught the last minutes of Joliz Dela Peña’s “When The Body Remembers”—a durational performance piece in which the artist drags a boulder wrapped in barb-wire from a point in the downtown to a patch of greenspace beside the gallery, and, once there, cuts the barbwire into shorter pieces that she then wraps painfully around her legs and torso, the points of the wire cutting into her skin. With difficulty, Dela Peña then changes her clothes in front of the audience, the boulder at her feet sitting on what looks like a keffiyeh, as the top and pants she puts on get caught and torn in the wire. A commentary on the experience of immigrant women, as a witness, I found myself pained, tense, and saddened in watching it unfold, but then a kind of flood of warmth hit me as Dela Peña made her way through the audience, hugging each viewer one by one as the tears began to flow. It’s intrinsic to both performance art and to festivals like Hold Fast that one may witness—seemingly by chance—such moments of vulnerability, danger, and redemptive beauty in the public square, creating—wordlessly, beyond language—such a sense of community and empathy amongst people who would otherwise likely never talk to one another, and it’s for this reason that Hold Fast and Eastern Edge Gallery continue to play such vital roles in our community and beyond.
Relieved and exhausted at last, my family and I went into the gallery and sat amongst the audience together on the floor, listening to the strange and whimsical sounds of Kira and Gina’s last performance to close the afternoon. Kira’s ethereal voice, the manipulated sounds of her harp and Gina’s violin created the sense of having passed through the looking-glass into some topsy-turvy world whose rules and boundaries remain nebulous, even as inevitably, it seemed, we were on the way home.
Craig Francis Power is an artist and writer from St. John’s, Newfoundland (Ktaqmkuk). Total Party Kill, his collection of poetry exploring addiction and sobriety through the imagery of Dungeons & Dragons, has just been published by Breakwater Books.