The play’s the thing

Textile artist and Manitoba Craft Council program co-ordinator Katrina Craig had a simple brief for the artists taking part in her curatorial debut, Serious Play, at C2 Centre for Craft: each person was asked to investigate the radical potential of play when making pieces for the show.

The four local interdisciplinary artists — Charlotte Sigurdson, Candace Neumann, Maureen Winnicki Lyons and Miriam Delos Santos — took her playful instructions seriously.

“Culturally, we think of play as frivolous or irrelevant. It’s a low priority,” Craig, 35, says. “But I think of play as an essential part of creating new things and of problem-solving. I’ve found that when I lean into that not-so-serious side of myself, good things tend to come about.”

The theme is especially pertinent in the field of craft, which can often be more intensely focused on rigorous skill-building and technical mastery. Sometimes playfulness can fall to the wayside in the pursuit of excellence

“When we’re really caught up on optimizing and outputs, there are some things which can be missed along the way,” Craig says.

“I often think about Alysa Liu’s gold-medal free skate in the 2026 Winter Olympics that captivated everyone. She had all of the technique and training, but what set her apart was she was fully relaxed, fully embodied in the experience, and working from her heart and her joy to be participating.”

While the exhibition reflects Craig’s own views on the importance of leaning into play, the resulting works are wholly the vision of each artist.

“I let them do their thing; it’s really important to me that people feel they’re working on things they’re interested in. I enjoy that I am not in control of every aspect, that they’re going to bring in elements I wasn’t expecting or wouldn’t come up with on my own,” she says, noting that Neumann’s work — Spider Woman and the Doorway to the Ancestors — was something she would never have conceived of herself.

Neumann’s symbolism-rich works are often tinged with humour, and Spider Woman is no different.

“I knew I wanted to make a larger sculptural spider, but originally I thought I would make it more like a doll, more human rather than spider,” she says. “But it really transformed into being more true to what a spider, specifically a black widow, looks like.”

Clad in two pairs of shoes and complete with miniature accessories, including a smudge bowl, rattle, tin cup, tiny cigarettes with a cigarette packet, and a Yahtzee game with dice and pencils, Spider Woman is multi-layered piece showcasing the artist’s signature wit.

“I’m delighted she brought it into the world,” Craig says. “It went in a different direction that I anticipated but I am so glad it did. The real surprise was this black widow spider taking form, and how Candace really departed from the reality of what a spider is into a more surreal, playful version from her imagination.”

Sigurdson had just ended a run of shows when Craig approached her.

“I thought it sounded fun, ” she says of the brief. “I was just coming off some shows with heavier themes so I was excited to lighten up a bit. Over Christmas I became obsessed with tarot cards and then playing cards in general and it just clicked that that was the perfect vehicle for a show about play.”

Her 13 dolls are based on a suit in a deck of cards and made from either fabric, hand-carved wood or doll clay. All the dolls are finished with goldwork and beadwork. Their remarkably detailed faces were hand-painted by Sigurdson, who concocted psychological profiles for each doll and imagined their personal lives in order to create individual expressions.

Delos Santos’s interpretation of Serious Play took the form of a gloriously frothy frock with a body made from hundreds of hand-stitched ruffles studded with pom-poms. Titled Scrappy Joy, the dress is made entirely from textile remnants she’d saved from her other projects.

This is the first time the clothing and accessories designer is showing her work in a gallery.

“Katrina gave me the opportunity to explore and express the ‘why’ in the work I’ve been doing for years. I have been saving scraps of textiles, fabrics too beautiful and precious to be thrown away, which I kept making into ruffles in my free time. I tossed them in a bag, knowing their time would come,” she says.

For interdisciplinary artist Winnicki Lyons, the theme couldn’t have come at a better time.

The idea for her piece had been germinating in her mind for more than a year after she learned that Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences was working to bring back the woolly mammoth from extinction.

“I knew precisely what I wanted to contribute, because I’d been looking for a reason to bring it to life,” Winnicki Lyons says. “I knew it would be the life-size woolly mammoth Whimsy, and her little friend Mayhem, the woolly mouse.”

Measuring 240 x 197 x 20 centimetres, Whimsy is a testament to Winnicki Lyons’ mastery. The multi-textured beast and her mouse friend were made with wool, yarn, stone, wire, beads, lampwork glass, leather, trash, cloth, textile waste and resin, among other things, from a number of rug-tufting methods including rug-and-latch hook, punch needle and felt-making.

Because of its size, the mammoth had to be built in pieces, which Winnicki Lyons then stitched together.

Craig is thrilled with how her first show has come together. The artists not only fulfilled the brief, they took it in directions she couldn’t have imagined, she says, pointing out how Delos Santos and Winnicki Lyons used their playfulness to touch on more serious topics of our time.

“In my own creative work, everything is a very clear reflection of my own life and my own mind,” she says. “Curation starts with my ideas and viewpoint, but it gives space for how different people’s lives and experiences are. There are artists in the show talking about topics I think are so interesting and important but aren’t lived experiences I’ve personally had.

“It feels like an honour to facilitate bringing all these voices together.”

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