Jenna Van Buekenhout

www.jennathreads.com

Jenna Van Buekenhout reaches out from an inherited textile tradition to entangle and untangle sculpture, poetry, and conversations into a undisciplinary artistic practice. Her work complicates simple metaphors with the material and emotional vulnerability of living specificity. She was born and raised in unceded territory of the Coast Salish People and the Stö:lō Nation in British Columbia. She currently works in Mohkinstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 Territory. She got her BFA with distinction from Alberta University of the Arts in 2019, and her MFA from Maine College of Art & Design in 2025. She has shown in Friedman and Zand Head Galleries, and the Kinnship House.


We have wound dense threads of body politic into accumulated layers that form rigid knots, hardened into stone, habits so encrusted by their own accumulation that they fracture rather than untie. Our connection to our bodies, our relations and reciprocity to our others and to the world around us, our larger ecosystem; all have been devalued through historical processes that sustain the logic of individuality over wellbeing. Textiles, like language, spin connective fibres into strands that we use as tools. This work is a call to to weave an earth on which difference is accommodated, valued, and cared for. There is no right way to be, only the fabric of entanglement in which we can work to be more mindful of our needs and impact.