Artist Statement

As an eighth-generation descendant, my fibre works explore the complex 400-year history and enduring contributions of Black communities in Nova Scotia. I create social and anthropological statements investigating deeply personal and collective meanings of “Home” and “Belonging”. My creative practice is guided by the structural framework of utilizing visual narrative to speak the unspoken, shifting the focus from a history of struggle to one of indefatigable strength, reclamation, and recovery.

Visual art has great capacity to translate story into imagery and I feel that even difficult narratives have potential for shift via choice of colour pallet, de-escalation through the softness of fibre, and re-framing through alternative lenses - thus easing the intensity of subject matter with a promise of objectivity enlivened by the macro view. I am drawn to utilitarian fibre crafts in particular, with each loop or stitch contributing to the story-telling narrative of the Canadian experience. I tend to be alternatingly playful and challenging in my artistic statements - often wrestling with the artistic agency of works within perhaps yet unseen and unspoken truths.

Biography

Lisa (Whalen) Meecham, is a proud eighth-generation African Nova Scotian descendant whose familial communities include Monastery (Tracadie), Guysborough, Truro, Halifax (Africville), Goldenville (Sherbrooke). An ambitious and artistic agent of change, intent on crafting expanded new narratives, Lisa is a community organizer and accomplished artist in multiple media including woodworking and fibre arts. Re-purposing and up-cycling are regularly deployed in her work to create functional pieces of art producing original contemporary social and anthropological statements.

The Whalen family was displaced from Nova Scotia and dispersed mid-1960's with Lisa being born in Ontario. At age 19 she made her way to Nova Scotia on her own and stayed for several years - not knowing any of her history nor community. She left and relocated back to Ontario and remained there for the following three decades - working doggedly in and for communities that were not her own - always sensing that something was amiss. Finally, after researching, writing, and producing works of discovery, she came Home for Good in 2022. She now lives and works from her studio home in Stillwater Lake, Nova Scotia.

An award-winning Traditional Rug Hooker, Lisa’s mats have been displayed in Canadian government offices, Canadian and US art galleries, living history museums, and guilds. Her piece My Right is a Future of Equality with Other Americans was part of the Lift Every Voice exhibition (Fifteen hooked rugs reproduced from the “I Am The Black Woman” series of block prints by Elizabeth Catlett, 1947) which toured several US states from 2023-2025 and included George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, MN. Her work, CANVAS was photographed for Sotheby's Insight: The Art of Living, The Leaders Issue 2021.

Lisa offers enthusiastic instruction to those who simply wish to learn this “one simple loop” and encouragement of the role of rug hooking in preserving family stories and micro-histories. She is the founder of the Woolly Good Hooking online network, a 3000+ community over several platforms fostering connection and championing the cultural and therapeutic benefits of rug hooking and re-vitalization of the heritage arts. She has numerous thematic works in progress and often collaborates with artists of other mediums. She is currently creating new works for an upcoming exhibition, including a hooked interpretation of Richard Rudnicki’s painting Freedom Halifax 1814, which depicts the arrival of Black Chesapeake refugees in Nova Scotia.