Textile Artist Statement: Sara Norquay (2026)
My art practice is shaped by my perceptions of the physical world and my observations of human activity—whether cultural, social, contemporary, or historical. I have always felt a profound need to express what I learn and to create objects to better understand the world around me. Manipulating materials to discover unexpected visual relationships is what keeps me engaged. Throughout my practice, I have gathered what is close at hand—fabric, thread, yarn, paper, ink, paint, dyes, and natural objects like stones, wood, leaves, and flowers—to explore the mysteries of the visual world.
Art school taught me the fundamental importance of looking. It was an education in perception, focused on closely analyzing what happens when two seemingly disparate elements meet.
Today, fabric is one of my primary mediums. As a universally accessible material: it shapes our daily lives, we wear it, use it for mundane tasks, decorate our environments, and display it to mark important spaces, monumental events, and cultural memories.
Having learned to sew at twelve years old, I spent decades making clothing, costumes, dolls, and household linens. Following a long career as a printmaker, I have returned to these functional roots, translating those foundational techniques into textile art. Over the past six years, I have created more than 100 textile pieces. While some retain a functional element, all are intended to reveal a visual world discovered through the process of making.
I share this work in the hope that it resonates with you, offering a sense of beauty, mystery, wonder, and comfort, while inviting you into exciting new visual relationships.
Printwork Artist Statement
Printmaker.
Print Artist.
Image Maker.
Image Collector.
Miner of the inner life.
Forger.
Mediocre poser.
Enthusiast.
Experimenter.
Unrepentant doer.
I am interested in the unexpected: the relationships between shapes or images that surprise me; that conjure something not seen before. I work intuitively from a picture in my mind’s eye or from a visual reference or text. Colour and shape can be major subjects but I tend to explore a specific idea for each body of work.
Interviews
After the Alberta Craft Council exhibition #ABCraft opened, I received a request for an interview from the Saskatchewan Craft Council about my use of technology in making my handmade books.
Wendy McGrath interviewed Norton (me and Mark Dutton) for SNAPline.
Text(s) for Mouffetard’s Week.
On a sensible day, a week before losing not two but two dozen inhibitions, Mouffetard made a momentous decision. He opened a cabinet in which was filed thirty years’ correspondence with someone he had never met in the flesh. The first letter brought tears to his eyes. The second left him confusing insight with ecstasy. The seventh letter inspired him to dig around in his Glory Hole where he found a mysterious object. (The seventh letter inspired him to dig around in his Glory Hole where he found some banknotes in a currency no longer accepted as legal tender.) The discovery called up the scent of roasting chestnuts and the sound of water lapping at an ancient quay. On the third day, he remembered he’d forgotten to put a coin in his mother’s purse so she would have something to give to Harrison on her afternoon walk. Her resources of improvisation were considerable; but he still felt deep regret at the oversight. His reverie, however, was interrupted by the next letter, which startled his vocal cords into inarticulate sound. It came from his body; or else from a place in his soul that had little truck with his monkey mind. All it was, was “Ah.” When he failed to make the “ah” again, he made a pot of tea and reread the letter. “Enough already with the half-baked koans,” he muttered. “I don’t have all century for this.” He went to his father’s desk, took out paper, ink and a bamboo brush, and began to write. Laying down his brush at the end of a page, he tore a leaf from Remembrance of Things Past, and rolled a joint. “Regret will not bring back what I have lost,” he thought. “But losing my fist might give me back my hand.” From the letters came a strange light, and with it, the courage to act. “What dread hand dare seize the fire?” he asked himself – knowing the answer at last. On the morning of the seventh day, he scooped up the cremated ashes from the kitchen hearth into an envelope and filed them in his father’s cabinet. Shutting the door behind him, he stepped out into an unfamiliar garden, across which his mother’s clothesline still hung.
S L Norquay 
Mid your wonder-labyrinth of images we need to hear words. Write us our stories.