Kelly Thompson is an artist and Associate Professor in the Department of Studio Art, Concordia University, focusing on the Fibres and Material Practices programs and is a researcher with the Hexagram Institute for Research-Creation in Media Arts and the Textiles and Materiality Research Cluster. From June 1, 2016 she will also be the MFA Studio Art Graduate Program Director. She has lived and worked in California, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom before arriving at Concordia in 2009. This mobile life informs her artistic and academic activities, with ongoing research into place, border and postcolonial theories, travel and material culture, and textiles as cultural signifiers embedded with critical and narrative content. Her artistic work often utilizes mapping concepts, or represents open waters and the borders between land, sea or river, as markers of transitory moments of time, place, body and memory. Recent research-creation projects address everyday ephemeral traces, language, translation and the manipulation of data in punch card and digital jacquard weaving. She has a chapter in Sloppy Craft: Post-Disciplinarity and Craft, (2015), which addresses embodied knowledge while recent international group exhibitions include Parallax: Landscape in Translation (with Cynthia Hammond & Kathleen Vaughan) FoFA Gallery, Montreal (2014) Inter-sensorial Threads, NSW Australia (2013), Fibreworks 2012 (2012), Ontario, Mexico VI Bienal Internacional de Arte Textil Contemporåneo (2011), Vanish/Survive,Vilnius, Lithuania, Fiberart International 2010 Pittsburg, PA, USA (2010) Portable connection/conexión, Casa de la Cultura-Municipal, Holguin, Cuba ( 2010) Fiberart International 2007 Pittsburg, PA, Global Intrique – Tradition and Innovation, 3rd European Triennial Textile and Fibre Art, Riga, Latvia (2007).

See www.kellythompson.org/ for images of past work and www.materialcodesephemeraltraces.com/ for her current research-creation project.