Reilly Knowles

Reilly Knowles is a Southern Ontario-based interdisciplinary artist and graduate of Western University’s Honours Bachelor of Fine Arts program. He has been exhibiting since 2015, showing in such venues as Artlab Gallery (London, ON), Good Sport (London, ON), and Holcim Gallery (Milton, ON), and is a recipient of the Tony and Betsy Little Gold Medal in Visual Arts, the Canadian Embroiderers’ Guild Memorial Prize, and the Forest City Gallery Exhibition Award. When not in the studio, Knowles works as the Curatorial & Collections Assistant at Woodstock Art Gallery.

I approach art-making as another layer of the creation and decay that is already happening all around me – a stitch made through cloth is entwined with a leaf becoming mud on the forest floor, and with the blue powder left behind by a plastic fork. Found objects made by humans and non-humans alike come together as quilts, garments and embroideries, the fragility of fabric and its ties to the wear and tear of everyday life reiterating the ways that creation and decay fold over each other in an infinite tangle.