Under the Covers: blanket at the Craft Council and the Weight of Warmth
Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador | Nov. 15-Dec. 19, 2025
Reviewed by Amanda Marie Hull
At the Craft Council of NL Gallery (155 Water St., Second Floor, St. John’s), blanket takes a word you think you understand and returns it to you altered—heavier, stranger, newly charged. A cross-media suite of textile and textile-adjacent works—stitched and structured, gridded and patched, frayed and fortified—the exhibit features ten Newfoundland and Labrador-based artists: Trudy-Jo Campbell, Jessie Donaldson, Marcia Huyer, Nancy Jacobsen, Robyn Love, Michelle MacKinnon, Tessa May, Shawn O’Hagan, Kelsey Street, and Larry Weyand. Moving between cloth, wood, glass, and constructed form, the installation renders covering as something engineered rather than assumed: a material practice that gathers experience, labour, humour, erosion, and repair until the viewer can see how meaning accumulates at the surface and in the seams. Its promise is wonderfully simple—blanket as noun, adjective, verb. Its achievement is far more complex: tenderness with teeth; past, present, and future biting at the same edge of fabric.
The wall text across from the entry sketches the breadth: swaddling and shrouding, gifts and heirlooms, sleep and anxiety, memory stitched into material—and also smothering, comfort that curdles, and the brutal inheritance bound up in what a blanket can signify. That framing could have become a thesis that does all the work. Instead, the art argues back, and what it keeps returning to—quietly, insistently—is time.
The exhibit’s most insistent through-line is temporality, not as theme, but as texture. It registers first as wear: pilling, fading, raveling, the exhausted give of something used to the edge of collapse, the stubborn evidence of having been lived with. In Campbell’s “The Best Warmth,” blankets become a household archive: objects kept past usefulness because they hold separation, attachment, and the intimate embarrassment of use. O’Hagan’s “Clear Cut” pushes that archive outward, stitching labour-history and forest-loss into the same damaged, augmented textile, as if comfort cannot be separated from the injuries that made it necessary. Jacobsen’s “Still” exposes the mechanism behind such histories: a sewing machine altered into an industrial relic, poised for work yet arrested, domestic expectation made visible at the moment it stops being obeyed.
Time registers again as repetition: patterns remade, grids counted, inheritance, and discipline. Street’s “Weaving With You” holds lineage in close attention: a grandmother’s pattern followed closely enough to honour it, changed just enough to prove it’s alive in another hand. May’s “Two Thousand and Twenty Five Little Squares and Nine Big Ones for 2025” turns repetition into endurance—counting as a strategy, order as a spell cast against insomnia. Weyand’s “Used napkins and tender-quilts” pushes repetition into the social: napkins and quilts as technologies for managing mess, appetite, tears, decorum—care repeated until it risks becoming discipline. Jessie Donaldson’s “Paper Quilt” makes the grid explicitly archival, paper wrinkling like memory, a record of rupture held together by communal care rather than private coziness.
The show’s most direct confrontation with time is inevitability, staged where comfort usually promises escape. Love’s “Remember You Must Die (Wet Blanket)” places a memento mori in the bed and refuses to keep death abstract; reflection pulls the viewer into the reminder, making vulnerability a shared condition rather than an idea. Michelle MacKinnon’s “Visibly Mended” compresses that tension into the body: repair that doesn’t erase the seam, delicacy braided with anxiety. Marcia Huyer’s “Snow Wanderer” carries the question into winter—an almost-erased figure moving under a thick blanket through the woods—belonging sought under cover, protection shading toward disappearance.
In the end, blanket doesn’t romanticize warmth—it interrogates it. It asks what we’re really doing when we cover ourselves: what we’re trying to forget, what we’re trying to endure, what we’re trying to keep intact. The exhibit understands that comfort is not the opposite of difficulty but one of its most intimate forms—a strategy, a ritual, sometimes a lie we tell with our whole bodies. You leave with the uneasy sense that blankets are not just made of fibres and patterns, but of time itself: worn, inherited, mended, refused, and held close anyway.
Amanda Marie Hull lives in Conception Bay South, Newfoundland with her husband, Paul, and two fur-children, Bear and Sookie. A graduate student in Memorial University’s Creative Writing Program, she is an imaginative eco-socialist who loves books, wine, Sunday brunch with friends, and metaphorical rabbit-holes.