biography
Liz Pead graduated from New Brunswick College of Craft and Design in 1993 Fabric Surface Design and 1995 Textiles. In 2007 she completed her BFA at OCADU as the Medal Winner in Drawing and Painting. She makes Canadian landscape installations from just about anything she can get her hands on including recycled hockey gear, wool, thread, and sometimes oil paint. She has a dirty little ink drawing habit.
Liz plays ice hockey and has spent a lot of time in Iceland, playing hockey and being inspired by the landscape and artists that live there. In October 2013, she completed her Icelandic ‘Hattrick’; all three National Ice Hockey Arenas have her work in their collections. In May 2014, she went to Blönduós, Northern Iceland for a month-long residency at TextileSetur, researching traditional Icelandic materials, techniques and patterning.
Recent explorations use textile as extended paint, exploring landscapes through drawing with thread on knitted and woven metal substrates. In 2016, Pead attended workshops in Weaving Copper Wire with Sayward Johnson (from Ottawa) and Advanced Machine Knitting Techniques with Ursula Rautenbach (Heriot Watt University, Scottish School of Textiles; Galashiels, Scottish Borders)
In 2017 she received the Mary Diamond Butts Award from Craft Ontario recognizing Excellence in Embroidery. She travelled to Germany, Austria and Denmark to research textile history and techniques in various institutions.
Her Toronto studio is in Toronto’s Junction Arts District in Toronto.