One Brown Outlier (Sheep) Artwork

Shayla Bond is a Canadian textile artist who integrates design principles into fibre works to preserve heritage craft techniques within a contemporary framework. Her work explores themes of perfectionism, control, and obsession through aesthetic strategies such as color, precision, and repetition. After spending a decade in a digital career post-university, Bond returned to her formal training in textiles, seeking a more profound, tactile connection with her work. Her process combines her experience in computer-generated design with hands-on traditional techniques. Her quest for perfection is evident in her manipulation of pliable materials, compelling them to take on definite forms using sewing, weaving, and quiltmaking. In her recent body of work, Bond begins with computer-generated pixel patterns created through numerical algorithms and digitally manipulates the templates to provoke distinct emotional and aesthetic reactions. This process bridges the digital with the tactile and challenges the impersonal nature of technology through the intimacy of craft. Shayla's contemporary quilts transcend traditional boundaries, fluidly moving from floor to bed to wall to furniture, challenging and expanding the conventional roles of quilts. Through her art, she invites viewers to reconsider the practical and artistic potential of quilts in modern interiors. At the heart of her practice lies a dedication to closing the gap between historic and contemporary making. The old crafts are preserved in her work, where the echoes of the past harmonize with the cadence of the present.