The new year begins with “The Texture of Life”

by Shelley Werner

(Calgary) – A Walk in the Forest – quilt art by Trudy Cowan – is the beautiful cover image on the Rosh Hashana Calgary ediiton of Alberta Jewish News. It is part of an exhibit titled The Texture of Life – the first show to kick off the new year in the TBT Gallery in Calgary. The gallery is fortunate to feature this solo exhibition by artist Trudy Cowan as a joyous and colourful “walk in the forest” as we contemplate the end of last year and the journey into the new one.

TBT Gallery was founded in 2021, and has hosted 17 exhibitions by local artists, with the conviction that Jewish art enriches both cultural life and spiritual life. The arts reach us at an affective level, stirring imagination, memory, and compassion while offering glimpses of the sacred woven throughout human experience. By inviting people to engage with these images, the hope is to nurture a profound and enduring relationship with God, community, and self.

Trudy Cowan is an artist who fits beautifully into the mandate of TBT Gallery. Her work reaches us at our core level: storytelling that is uplifting and reflective of life.

Curator Jennifer Eiserman says, “Trudy Cowan’s quilt-based artworks transform fabric, thread, and stitch into richly layered narratives that celebrate the beauty found in both everyday experiences and the natural world. Through intricate textures and carefully crafted details, Cowan invites viewers to reflect on life’s interconnected stories, where each stitch contributes to a larger tapestry of resilience, wonder, and human experience.”

She will be displaying her “art quilting” which is a technique involving fibre, innovative thread techniques, integration of beads, shells and other textured objects. Her work is inspired by nature and has even fostered the mystique of whether actual leaves are integrated, as the rendering of forest notes is so realistic.

Her interest in fibre began at a young age. Trudy says, “I was most drawn to sewing by my grandparents, all of whom were tailors from the old country, and my grandfather was my dearest friend. He always checked what I wore to see whether it was made of good material and put together properly. I asked him to teach me to sew, and so my grandmother taught me to knit and to crochet. It was my grandfather that actually taught me sewing.”

Cowan’s long and varied professional career in the heritage field was recognized with the awarding of an honorary doctorate from the University of Calgary.  She was also vice-chair of the Little Synagogue on the Prairie Project that brought the historic Montefiore Institute to Calgary’s Heritage Park.  Now, in “retirement,” it is her art work that has received awards, including being named Quilter of Distinction in 2017 at the renowned Heritage Park Quilt Festival.

Upon retirement she focused on her art quilts. She finds working with fibers “somewhat addictive.” Trudy reflects on her influences: “The idea is that things speak to you, and that you want to tell stories about them. It’s the interrelationship of storytelling. I walk in the forest where the trees, the animals and the birds speak to me. When I was a child, my mother and I would go for walks. I would show my mom a stone and she would say ‘that’s a beauty’. It was many years before I realized that was a rock. I thought the word for it, the name of it, was “beauty”. I’ve grown up looking at things and seeing things perhaps a little differently from some people who just walk past things.”

In her quilts she mostly uses commercial fabrics. She employs every imaginable weight, colour and texture of threads, sewn by hand or by machine. She uses many beads and yarns. Some of the branches are pipe cleaners wrapped in cloth and formed into shapes. She has invented some techniques and has learned from a lot of different artists, quilters and people who work in these various media. “If I want a big tree and a little tree, and I start putting things out, I do what we tend to call ‘auditioning’ fabrics and colors and textures.”

She belonged to a guild in Calgary called The Quilted Mouse. The idea of telling a story about a little mouse and quilts came up in the group. She wrote a children’s story. It’s in rhyming verse and is entitled “The Little Mouse: a fable in fabric.” The story is illustrated with 11 quilts that she designed and created. It was published by a local company. The book will be available for purchase via the show.

The title The Texture of Life is fitting for the exhibition because it is an experiential show for the viewer, where you can gain a portrait of life as you see it.

Trudy says about the viewers of the show: “I’d like them to just feel happy. That it’s peaceful. Not all of them are. There’s one about wildfires that is not very peaceful. But I would like people to feel that there is a relationship that they could develop with the image. Some of them are pretty straightforward, and some of them, you need to look at a little bit more.” She hopes that viewers enjoy the experience and, as with the piece, ‘A Walk in the Forest,’ feel that they have been there.

“The Texture of Life” can be seen from September 1 to December 4, 2026 at TBT Gallery, Temple B’nai Tikvah, 900 47 Ave SW, Calgary. Monday to Thursday 9:00 am to 4:00 pm/ Friday 9:00 am to 2:00 pm or by appointment. Contact the office (403) 252-1654. The opening reception will be on September 24, 6:30 – 8:30 pm.