Festival Art Souterrain
Creature Fingers: Fibre Arts + Greenscreen
Join the FOFA Gallery for a workshop inspired by Abi Hodson’s exhibition, Peep Show: Parallel loops, Porous lines. Led by the artist, participants will create textile hand puppets and activate them within a live-projected green screen video installation inside FOFA Gallery. Participants will work together to create a collaborative video piece that will later be edited and shared with them by the artist.
Biography
Abi Hodson is a transdisciplinary artist and facilitator living between Kjipuktuk/Halifax and Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Their practice is grounded in fibres and collage. Through video, movement, sculpture, and zine-making, they construct a language of sensory entanglements to research the real and manufactured space between ourselves and the material world (between the tongue and what it tastes, between our bodies and the environments we build). Through their work, Abi seeks to spark curiosity, delight, and generative discordance.
Abi also facilitates spaces where participants can collaborate and play, partnering with organizations including articule, the Rainbow Refugee Association of Nova Scotia, and HOSI Salzburg. They are the recipient of the 2025 Jorisch Family Residency Award and the 2025 Elspeth McConnell Fine Arts Internship Award and have shown their work at artist-run-centres, galleries, and festivals including articule, Fonderie Darling, and Nocturne festival.
Visit Abi Hodson’s Instagram
About the exhibition
Peepholes and a motion responsive video reveal sites where limbs merge and layer with the materials that construct and reconstruct Montréal’s body. The construction site—a location where workers structurally transform a body of land and/or the matter that sits beneath it and/or above it—is layered with the human body, itself another site of change. An uneasy kinship emerges between two transforming bodies, where the systems of control, value, and normativity that intertwine in both human and city bodies converge and, sometimes, rupture. These points of overlap hold potential energy, but without direction, disruption risks repeating the very ideals it has the capacity to unsettle.
New construction materials and site footage are recontextualized through the visual language of a peep show, relocating these signifiers of change into an erotic register. Dislocating the construction site from its naturalized position of perpetually reproducing existing systems of control opens up space for a still unknown something-else to emerge through disturbance: a coalition of changing bodies and sites that push through the barriers of wall and window, inviting you to come closer.
Date : Tuesday, May from 4 PM to 7 PM
Duration: 3 hours
Audience: All ages
Capacity: 10–12 participants maximum
Language: English
Admission: Free
An intimate and enriching experience for contemporary art enthusiasts and curious minds wishing to explore the dialogue between performance, installation, and textiles in Abi Hodson’s work.
