Traditional Rug Hooking:
An introduction is provided to the one simple loop of traditional wool rug hooking. This utilitarian craft-turned-art form is rooted in our Canadian history and a culture of up-cycling well before it was fashionable. Designs and techniques may illustrate the use of colour, contrast, value, lines, shape, form, repetition, rhythm, colour schemes, variety, space, emphasis, proportion, and balance. Patterns and designs are easily created using any form of inspiration; colouring books, pictorials, geometrics, nature, etc.
All basic materials, tools, and time are provided for the project typically completed within the sessions. The course is easily adaptable and suitable for beginners and seasoned rug hookers, as well as those with minimal and maximum dexterity and sight abilities. Completed traditional rug hooking projects are instant heirloom treasures, often coming with the bonus gift of a spoken word history during their creation. Once mastered, the technique of rug hooking is easily and independently replicated by the participant.
Traditional Rug Hooking is now enjoying a resurgence in craft and art circles – often leaping into the category of High Art. Subsequent projects can serve many practical household functions as well as being beautiful works of art shown in galleries throughout the world. It is as diverse an art form as those that practice it. Artist, Lisa Meecham, draws from the Canadian cultural narrative to connect with those new and seasoned to the craft. Her talks are lively interactive artist adventures with hands-on demonstration of materials and techniques.
About the artist - Lisa (Whalen) Meecham
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.
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