This exhibition is all about love.
Meet Samantha Lance (SL), Curator for the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington in Ontario, Canada, who shares how collaboration, trust, and storytelling shape exhibitions into multisensory, transformative spaces. With a passion for uplifting underrepresented voices, Samantha’s work invites dialogue, mystery, and community reflection. Textiles become archives of memory, resilience, and ancestral connection, guiding both curating and collecting.
(TSA) Let’s start with having you share a bit about your work process and inspiration.
(SL) I see the exhibition space as a palette. One on which artists and I can create a kaleidoscope of colours that have never been mixed before. Trust is the heartbeat of collaboration, and artists share their stories and histories with me in good faith as their curator. Together, we can reimagine the museum or gallery as a multisensory, accessible space for visitors to share their unique perspectives on art. I hope to continue creating exhibitions that spark memorable moments, personal connections, and transformative experiences for audiences of all ages.
I gravitate towards voices that have not had the chance to share their narrative. Curation is a tool that can empower artists and visitors to speak their truth and be in dialogue with one another. I believe that the most compelling exhibitions invite mystery and encourage audiences to continue the conversation beyond the gallery space. As curator, my role is to welcome surprises and embrace critical reflections from community members who are willing to engage with challenging works of art. When artists and visitors are not afraid to ask questions and shift my perspective, they make me into a better curator and intellectual thinker.
(TSA) Do you have a favorite textile memory?
(SL) My favorite textile memory is the fabric screen-printed curatorial statement for my graduation exhibition, The Love that Remains (2024), which included the hand-embroidered signatures of the three artists stitched into the fabric. Presented at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, this exhibition brought together three Toronto-based artists whose contemporary textile practices recover matrilineal histories of displacement and belonging. Par Nair, Julie Gladstone, and Carol Ann Apilado revitalize ancestral practices to reconnect with their families, genealogies, and homelands. In addition to my seamstress, Maggie, from Designer Sewing Showcase (Toronto) and Kid Icarus (Toronto Screen Print Studio) to craft the screen-printed curatorial statement to look like a scroll, I was honored for each artist to hand embroider their signatures into this fabric. When Par Nair, Julie Gladstone, Carol Ann Apilado, and I looked at this travelling textile on opening night, we knew it was an amalgamation of all our collaborative hard work and the trust we had developed over the school year.
(TSA) Does your work tend to reflect a communal process or more of an individual practice (or both?)
(SL) I think my curatorial work is a mixture of both. I enjoy conducting personal research while also collaborating with art workers during the planning and production of exhibitions. In my first year as Curator at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington (Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada), I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with talented guest curators and support their ambitious projects in the gallery. While wearing multiple hats, I understand that curators have to be creative problem-solvers and resilient leaders. Every aspect of the process—from the studio visits and grant-writing to the catalogues and programming—carves a special time and place for artistic visions to be recognized by the public. As I continue to learn and grow, I see that my role as a compassionate curator is to unlock new doors for creativity and collaboration, and to build long-lasting connections with communities near and far.
(TSA) Do you have any textile-related books / resources that you particularly recommend?
(SL) I would highly recommend reading The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History and The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St. Clair. Both are entertaining and illuminating reads. The author pinpoints stories and perspectives of textiles and natural dyes across cultures and time periods that may not be well known in our historical memory. After reading these books, I thought about how fabric and colour play a vital purpose to our existence. Could we live without feeling and seeing beauty every day? Not only have textiles and colour been a constant companion in our lifetimes, but they have also shaped the stories of ancient civilizations all around the world. They teach us about their unique belief systems, rituals, personal identities, and collective legacies.
One of my favourite chapters in The Golden Thread was “The Golden Cape: Harnessing Spider Silk” which led me to learn about the world’s largest golden spider silk cloths that were made for an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2012. Incredibly, this glittering shawl and cape were made from more than one million female golden orb-weaver spiders by a large team in the highlands of Madagascar. This dazzling work reminds me of the proverb, “Many hands make light work” and how it can be applied to both textile practices and curating.
(TSA) Are you actively collecting textiles? Please share something about this collection or about the process of collecting in general.
(SL) Although I am still in the early stages of collecting textiles, I always keep an eye out for new works to add to my personal collection when I visit local markets, exhibitions, or art fairs like Artist Project, Art Toronto, or the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair. Had it not been for developing a research focus on textile practices during my Master’s, I may have never ventured into taking a special interest in collecting contemporary fabrics!
In February 2024, I attended a powerful talk called “Embroidering Absence: War Memories of Salvadoran Women Refugees” organized by Dr. María J. Méndez at the University of Toronto. The guest speaker, Teresa Cruz, is a cultural promoter from the Museum of Word and Image (MUPI) in El Salvador, who discussed how Salvadoran women, forced into exile during the civil war (1980-1992), used embroidery to remember, honor, and share their experiences of war and displacement.
I learned from Dr. Méndez and Teresa Cruz that this beautiful hand-embroidered work I bought at their talk was created by Eva Guardado, a 78-year old woman who was a refugee in Mesa Grande during the Salvadoran civil war. She is part of “Mujeres Vueltenses Bordando Historias,” a collective of 22 women from Chalatenango, El Salvador. Dr. Méndez informed me that all the women who are part of this collective were refugees in Honduras, but two of them are granddaughters who were born after the war. The textiles that they sold at this event are contemporary works, whereas the historical embroideries (those made during the war at the refugee camps) are archived at MUPI in El Salvador.
This textile features a woman’s face adorned with flora and fauna. Underneath the face, the hand-embroidered text reads, “Donde las flores brotans tambien lo hace la esperanza” which translates to “Where flowers bloom, so does hope.”
(TSA) How do you imagine that humanity might engage with textiles in the future?
(SL) I believe that humanity will continue to cherish and protect textiles as important records of family legacies. If we take the time to carefully observe their intricate patterns and learn their secret languages, perhaps these heirlooms can be passageways to understanding what stories our ancestors kept close to their vest. Only these textiles–hidden between their skin and the fabrics they wore–knew their secrets and struggles, hopes and dreams. Lately, I have been thinking about how it takes strength to tell your own story. If textiles could be the missing links in our genealogies, maybe the first step is to dig into our long-forgotten storage bins and touch the fabrics between our fingertips. Could we hear the heartbeats of our ancestors if we hold the textiles as close to us as possible?
(TSA) What projects are you currently working on or looking forward to?
(SL) As a lifelong project, I hope to travel with my family to Finland, Croatia, and France to trace our ancestral roots and explore the textile practices still thriving in the communities our relatives left before immigrating to Canada. When the opportunity arises, I would be excited to meet artists in these places who have sustained textile traditions and added their own interpretations, passing them down through generations.
This research interest began when I learned from my mother that her paternal grandmother, Vera Sandvik, practiced Finnish/Swedish knitting and created an embroidered picture that hung in their living room, witnessed by three generations of women—my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother—at different points in time. This 61-year-old artwork was a gift from Vera to my Grandpa Gunnar and Grandma Katie Sandvik. The blue flowers and the brown wishing well that surround the capitalized words, “North South. East and West. Home is Best” led me to see my great-grandmother’s picture as a transtemporal textile, which means possessing the ability to metaphorically time travel and become a form of communication between daughters, mothers, and grandmothers. With the wishing well being an ancient symbol of magic, hope, and good fortune in times of uncertainty, I imagined the red thread or rope in the picture could represent bloodlines. Rather than separating North from South or East from West, perhaps Vera embroidered the cardinal directions in this way to reflect on her ties to multiple homes. With this new understanding, I realized that this textile—and other important family heirlooms—serve as an archive, a repository of memory, and an invitation to revitalize ancestral practices by incorporating them into my life.
Biography:
Samantha Lance is a Canadian curator and writer who creates exhibition experiences that bring hope and spark meaningful bonds between artists and communities from diverse backgrounds. She holds a Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies degree from the University of Toronto and a BFA with Distinction in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University. Her current role is the Curator for the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, located in Bowmanville, Ontario.
She has worked with and written for the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, C Magazine, the Art Gallery of Algoma, Onsite Gallery, and Latitude Gallery New York. Lance continues to engage with contemporary art and the public as a freelance writer, guest speaker, and invited moderator.
Her graduating exhibition, The Love that Remains, at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2024), brought together three Toronto- based artists whose contemporary textile practices recover matrilineal histories of displacement and belonging. Lance continues to research and connect with artists and curators who make it their lifelong work to advocate for women’s labour, textile practices, and the revival of ancestral techniques.
She continues to expand her worldview by learning about artists and their cultures, ancestries, life experiences, and spiritual beliefs different from her own. Lance is interested in experimental exhibition strategies that reimagine the museum or gallery as a multisensory, accessible space for visitors to share their unique perspectives on art.
Link to website / social media handles:
Website: https://samanthalance.format.com
Instagram: @samantha.lance1 (https://www.instagram.com/samantha.lance1/)
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/samcurates
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