Slowly and intentionally made garments and hand woven textiles.
Bio
Dakota Burpee is a textile artist and maker who researches the relations of body and cloth.
She is originally from Guelph, Ontario, and earned a BFA in Textiles and Fashion from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD University) in 2021. Burpee is a current MFA 2026 candidate at Emily Carr University and is now based in Cumberland, BC, on the traditional territory of the K’omoks people. She is a recipient of a BC Arts Council Scholarship to pursue her MFA and has been awarded the Oksakovsky & Goetz Tuition Scholarship.
Burpee’s work has been showcased through performances at wearable art shows, dance, and textile exhibitions across Canada. She received an Arts Creation grant from Arts NS and has participated in group exhibitions and multidisciplinary arts projects. Burpee travelled to Norway to attend a residency course with Digital Weaving Norway and was invited back to a training course to teach workshops across Canada as the Canadian representative for Digital Weaving Norway. Burpee taught various textile courses as a sessional instructor at NSCAD University. She has been a mentor at Cellulose Residency.
Artist Statement
I am a textile artist and maker based in Cumberland, BC, on the traditional territory of the K’omoks people on Vancouver Island. I work out of a quiet, small studio in my backyard, looking into my overgrown garden and spilling apple tree. I research the relationship between body and cloth. I use processes such as spinning fibre on a spinning wheel and weaving on a wooden floor loom to explore slowness. Movement and meditation bind my interests in these processes through their shared reliance on repetitive motion. Embodied labour guides my mode of research, spending time with the materials and tools I engage with.
My current research is a collection of handspun and woven forms that are an endeavour to understand animacy through working with various fibres as they shape-shift and move through forms. By spinning fibres, I respond to the qualities embedded within, allowing them to dictate the form of their arrival. I use a floor loom to weave the spun fibre into cloth, which will later be made into garments. Intrigued by the unifying human experiences of transformation (birth, life, death, shedding, growing, undoing, becoming, etc.), which we experience many times throughout our lives, I reference these in the form-shifting aspect of my work, making them visible in my garment forms.