Grids & Garments: In Conversation with Joy Walker

The first time I encountered Joy Walker’s work was during graduate school, as part of a faculty-led trip to Toronto. Her solo exhibition “Chanced” (2011), then on view at MKG127, featured a series of images with geometric shapes that registered the passage of time. Over days and weeks, Walker had moved a template across the surface of a sheet of construction paper. With each repositioning, areas exposed to sunlight through her studio skylight became increasingly muted—faded versions of their saturated selves. The result was a series of haunting and ephemeral works, grounded in material impermanence.  

In thinking about time, it seems apt to situate the following conversation through an opportunity I had to work with Walker some years later in the fall of 2016. For their inaugural show, DNA Artspace invited artist-pairs to collaboratively respond to the word “plexus” using a piece of graph paper. After some email exchanges, she elected to work with the gridlines themselves, while I would construct a support mechanism to facilitate display. As part of her process, Walker scanned, printed, and then rescanned the graph paper, repeating this action until the empty space of every gridline square diminished. Through this accumulation of slight misregistrations, the lines of the page transformed into dense gradations of a denim-like blue, so that the surface started to resemble a textile. 

This process mirrors where we find ourselves now, in the format of this conversation. I work towards a scaffolding, while she returns to the grid. Thinking about Walker’s practice, both through this past collaboration and more broadly, the space of the grid feels persistent. As a subject, the grid is embedded within a longstanding art-historical lineage. In Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay “Grids,” she contends that “By virtue of the grid, the given work of art is presented as a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric.”¹ For Krauss, the grid is both a self-contained autonomous symbol of Modernism but also something that points outward, referencing a world external to the frame. This quote speaks directly to Walker’s handling of grids—as fragmented, unbounded forms that slip and shift. Furthermore, Krauss’ metaphorical invocation of fabric unexpectedly aligns with the material logic of Walker’s textile-based practice. And so, while the grid feels like an appropriate place to begin, it also extends out into a discussion of the garment industry, gender politics and labour, as well as the need for materially sustainable practices.  

Liza Eurich (LE): You return to the motif of the grid throughout your practice. These representations evoke both the utilitarian language of stationery, but also the contemplative abstractions of Agnes Martin. Is your affinity for the grid aligned with the everyday, in dialogue with art historical lineages, or part of a different trajectory altogether? 

Joy Walker (JW): Initially, while studying textiles at OCAD, I was trained to use the grid as an underlying structure in designing prints for fabrics. All (commercially) printed patterns rely on the grid for alignment and spacing of motifs across the fabric. For me, this training was strangely satisfying, and I couldn’t help but relate it to a kind of emotional grounding therapy: a way of creating order out of chaos. Also, I don’t think we can overlook the fact that grid systems—the warp and weft of a woven fabric literally create a grid—have existed since ancient times. I think my continued fascination with the grid as it relates to textiles aligns with my interest in systems, repetition, pattern, labour, and time.

One of the many aspects that draws me to Agnes Martin’s work is the subtle imperfection present in her hand-drawn grids. They possess a distinctly textile-like quality, appearing to embody the deliberate slowness and repetitive manual gestures inherent to hand weaving. 

LE: I hadn’t considered Martin’s grids in relation to textiles before, but now this seems so apparent. Labour also feels central to your practice. With this connection in mind, I’m wondering about your past experiences using the grid as a tool in design and textile production. Could you speak more about working within these industries and how this shaped your approach to the grid as a subject?

JW: I grew up in a family steeped in garment manufacturing—my maternal grandfather manufactured women’s coats and suits, while my father and uncle designed and produced outerwear across menswear, womenswear, and childrenswear. In that atmosphere, I developed an early sensitivity to the tactile and visual language of textiles.

What first drew me in was the transformation inherent in the manufacturing process: the way a flat piece of fabric could be structured, shaped, and guided into something entirely new. In fashion design, the grid functions as an underlying system of order. It provides stability, predictability and control. However, working against the grid can produce more experimental and unusual forms. It can reshape how clothing relates to the body (think of fashion designers like Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, and their unconventional silhouettes). Although my current practice diverges significantly from traditional garment-making, it is directly informed by that lineage.

LE: Experimentation and divergence feel central. I’m drawn to the way your grids often seem to be misbehaving. They undo their own logic in a sense; they are interrupted, distorted, intentionally askew. What space do these slippages open up?

JW: I laughed when I read your question; I enjoyed the reference to the misbehaving aspect of interrupting a grid. I tend to notice these (grid) disruptions when I’m out walking and noticing asymmetries in the environment, like shadows falling unevenly across structured surfaces, misaligned bricks, and reflections in windows that distort lines.

So, for me, interrupting the geometry is a breaking of order and stability, and an investigation of what can happen visually when asymmetry disrupts the underlying structure. For example, in Untitled (Nude Descending a Staircase after Duchamp) from 2019, a digital Jacquard woven fabric created during a residency, the grid becomes the subject of the work, rather than serving as an invisible framework for constructing a repeat pattern for a textile. In creating this work, I wasn’t thinking about Duchamp’s 1912 painting, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2; I was playing against the rigid geometry of the grid. By cutting into it and introducing curves and circles, there suddenly seemed to be a bodily presence interrupting the lines that destabilized the static structure. Duchamp’s painting immediately came to mind as an after-the-fact frame of reference. His painting was widely considered radical at the time because it broke with the tradition of a static figure posed in space, replacing stillness with movement. 

LE: This is such an uncanny connection. Often the studio space—especially when associations appear unexpectedly mid-process—makes it feel like the work is speaking back to us. And again, once something enters the public sphere, it inevitably gathers new associations beyond an artist’s original intention. In this sense, meaning accrues through processes of exchange and reciprocity.

In some of your works, referentiality is explicit. Particularly in your naming of pieces like Untitled (Margiela Apron Dress 1999) and Untitled (Issey Miyake pants pattern). How do you see this process operating in your practice? Is it about acknowledging the labour of others, or does it point to something else? 

JW: The works you mentioned above were, in many ways, an attempt to enter into dialogue with two fashion designers I’ve long admired: Martin Margiela and Issey Miyake. It was less about the labour involved in the garments themselves and more about creating a response that shifted their garments into another realm.

By using primed canvas—a material deeply embedded in the history of artistic practice—and flattening what would normally wrap around the body, the clothing becomes a two-dimensional object hanging on the wall. I was interested in that transformation: how something functional and bodily could be recontextualized as image, surface, and form. Incidentally, I had been gifted the Margiela apron dress many years ago and had long viewed it as more of a minimalist painting than a piece of clothing, so in my 2024 exhibition “A Line Becomes a Thread” I found a way to embody that idea, using the exact dimensions of the dress. 

LE: Have you been gifted other garments that are waiting to be transformed? Is it important that they were given to you, or would you also consider seeking out something specific?

JW: I was given a Yohji Yamamoto shirt that ultimately became part of the exhibition mentioned above, and I’m currently considering transforming several other garments as well. The fact that they were gifted to me isn’t necessarily central to the work; I’ve also intentionally sought out specific pieces by other designers through vintage shops.

LE: Your work often seems to start with a finished object, like a garment, either as a reference or as the actual material that forms the basis for a new piece. 

Works like Untitled (Collar) [2024] or Untitled (Red Stripe) [2024] seem to embody this latter approach. In these, each retains recognizable components from their past life: the collar of a dress shirt, part of a sleeve, and buttons in both. Through this shift from closet to gallery, or from body to wall, these dislocated forms become estranged from their original purpose. This seems to point to questions of form vs. function, but I’m equally interested in how you use fragmentation as a starting point.

JW: I don’t see visual art and functionality as opposing forces. By removing these garment parts—collars and sleeves—from purely functional roles and placing them in a sculptural or conceptual context, I’m inviting viewers to reconsider them. Using fragmentation and recontextualization, familiar clothing components transform into autonomous objects. The detached collar and the sleeves connected by a collar (in Red Stripe) act as both remnants and signifiers, evoking a missing body while disrupting expectations of functionality and wholeness. At the same time, a collar attached to a wall becomes useless and slightly absurd, which reflects the playful quality I embrace in my work. 

LE: Absurdity feels like an important counterpoint.  In visual art, textiles have often been framed through the lens of craft or domestic labour, but your approach resists these categories. Instead, it’s conceptual, playful, dysfunctional—absurd. It exists in conversation with art historical figures like Martin and Duchamp, but also the aforementioned designers, Margiela and Miyake. Do you see your work operating between both spheres? 

JW: Yes and no. I’m interested in working both within and against those histories. Historically, textiles have long been associated with domestic labour, women’s work, decoration and utility, and those associations still shape how fibre-based practices are perceived. For a long period, I resisted using textiles because of that baggage—the medium often felt dismissed as craft rather than contemporary art.

What drew me back was realizing that those assumptions could become material to work with. I use fabric in ways that are intentionally playful or dysfunctional because I want to interrupt the expectation that textile should behave in a useful or decorative way. At the same time, I don’t think my work exists completely outside those traditional narratives. It still carries the history of labour, gender, and care embedded in textile practices. I’m interested in creating tension between those inherited meanings and more conceptual or illogical gestures, where familiar materials stop functioning as expected. 

LE: What prompted you to reconsider, to start integrating textiles into your practice?

JW: In 2019, I was granted a residency at the TextielLab in the Netherlands, where I had the opportunity to begin to integrate textiles back into my art practice using digital jacquard technology. Part of my motivation for wanting to produce a large-scale woven fabric was to pay tribute to the women of the Bauhaus—the groundbreaking German art school that united art, craft, and technology from 1919 to 1933—who were directed into weaving because they were barred from joining the painting studios on the basis of gender.

In the book Bauhaus Women by Ulrike Müller, Müller includes a note about Anni Albers that indicates Anni’s apprehension regarding her training at the Bauhaus, as she was relegated to the weaving studio instead of the painting studio, as she had intended. “In the third semester she turned up in the ‘Women’s Department,’ the weaving workshop, and felt out of place. She considered weaving too ‘womanish’ and began weaving without any great enthusiasm as this choice “caused the least comment.”² My aim for the project at the TextielLab was to incorporate brushstrokes into woven fabric to acknowledge and refute this gender bias. 

I feel it’s important to add that, although many women at the Bauhaus were steered into the weaving workshop because textile work was considered a feminine craft rather than a fine art, they ultimately transformed the medium into one of the school’s most innovative artistic practices. Artists like Anni Albers established that weaving could embody the same experimentation, abstraction, and conceptual rigour as painting or sculpture.

LE: It sounds like this residency was the perfect catalyst. I’m also curious about how this moment—access to different equipment and technologies, proximity to Bauhaus’ legacy—continues to inform your practice. 

JW: Coincidentally (and without my prior knowledge), during my residency at TextielLab, the TextielMuseum (which is next door to the lab) was opening an exhibition by women who trained at the Bauhaus school. I was excited to see the works by well-known textile weavers like Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl, but even more so to discover works by a less renowned but equally accomplished weaver, Otti Berger. What was most intriguing to me was Berger’s interest in textile innovation: she was the first female member of the Bauhaus to patent new fabrics and to experiment with textile methodologies and materials—a core component of my ongoing teaching practice.

LE:  This chance encounter with Berger’s practice seems to support your teaching in such a specific way. How are you thinking through textile experimentation in your pedagogy, or within broader social issues like sustainability?

JW: This is relevant to me as I have taught Fabric Science and Textile Laboratory within a college fashion program for many years, and am very aware of how the textile industry is grounded within global systems of labour, consumption and environmental impact.

I’m interested in how material processes can both reflect and challenge those structures.

I think of sustainability as a kind of mending practice rather than a fixed solution. Mending acknowledges the damage and gives us the opportunity to repair but not return to its original state. For me, sustainable practice is less about achieving purity and more about developing attentiveness by reworking existing materials, extending the life of garments, and remaining conscious of the systems each material passes through.

LE: Your analogy between mending and sustainability really resonates with me. So often, nostalgia for an idealized past obscures present issues and strategies for effecting meaningful change. With mending, there is acknowledgement but also a sense of feasibility within the scale of the gesture. Do practices of reuse or repair also enter into your studio work? 

JW: During my 2022 residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie, in their print and publishing lab, I created new works using discarded paper and test prints from previous projects left behind in the print shop. I had entered the residency with a completely different plan, but when I saw the accumulation of existing resources, it became clear that the work could emerge directly from the materials already available in the studio.

This experience led me to reevaluate the accumulation of materials in my studio, at home, and at the college where I teach. Materials that would have ordinarily been thrown away became the basis of the work. In Untitled (Remnants) [2024], I used leftover piano wire and began to “thread” cast-off textile fragments, employing the wire as a kind of needle. Through this slow, accumulative process, the emphasis is placed on the smaller textile remnants, reframing them as the essential elements that collectively generate the surface and structure of fabric.

LE: Was the leftover piano wire from a previous project, or something you collected for another purpose—a material affinity? 

JW: I had originally planned to use the piano wire for another project, but after a lot of time spent trying to wrangle it into shape, I realized I needed something more rigid, less bouncy. 

In general, I am (unfortunately or fortunately) always collecting found materials to be considered for future works. The hallway in my studio building in downtown Toronto is a catch-all for all kinds of discarded materials, there for the taking. 

LE: I’m interested in this catch-all situation. Are there any materials you’ve scooped up recently that you anticipate leading to a new work? Or rather, are you holding onto any accumulations you’re excited about? 

JW: Most recently, I’ve been amassing old clothing buttons for use in an upcoming project. Initially, my thought was to use my own collection, but when I realized I didn’t have enough, the project expanded through an open call on social media. 

I was not only struck by how many people responded but by how many memories and associations became attached to these small, inexpensive fasteners. People would tell me their stories about where a button came from, who owned it, or why it was saved. In one instance, I was invited to rummage through a large collection of buttons from an estate sale. What stood out to me was the way the buttons had been carefully organized by colour, size, and type, seeming like miniature artefacts. 

So, what began with the simple act of collecting buttons has grown into an exploration of memory and community. The final direction of the artwork is still uncertain, but the process of discovering where these connections lead has become an essential part of the work itself.

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Joy Walker is an artist and educator specializing in textile science. She has produced artist projects during residencies at the TextielLab in Tilburg, Netherlands, 2019 and in 2019 and 2022 at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands. Her works are held in several public collections.  She is represented by MKG127 in Toronto.

Liza Eurich is an artist, writer and curator. She co-founded and organizes the online publication Moire, as well as the project space Support. Represented by MKG127 in Toronto, her work has been exhibited at Stride, Open Studio, G Gallery, Neutral Ground, Plug In ICA, McIntosh Gallery and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. She currently resides in London, Ontario.

1. Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 50-64.
2. Ulrike Müller, Bauhaus Women: Art, Handicraft, Design (Flammarion, 2009): 52.

This article is published in issue 43.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue