Jessie Fraser is a Canadian-born visual artist based in Glasgow, UK. Her practice explores how photographs, literature, and thread may be combined to investigate the affective potential of woven cloth. Fraser completed an MFA in 2019 at the Alberta University of the Arts in Craft Media. Her work has recently been exhibited at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery (Calgary), Mary E. Black Gallery (Halifax), Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax), and Collect 2024 (UK). Using time as both a process and a material, Fraser’s practice centres on weaving. There is a thread that moves through her work which seeks to use material-heavy processes to communicate immaterial subject matter. Telling a story is a translation of materials; it is a selection of information that is salient to you. This idea has led Fraser’s research and studio practice to consider how the present rearranges the past. She negotiates ideas of presence and absence, history and memory, through site-sensitive installation and weaving. Inherently drawn to the process of weaving and cloth as a material for the strong role it has played in the human experience Fraser works with both traditional and digital weaving technologies. Fraser repeatedly finds herself seeking solace in previous generations, uncovering pieces of the past that feel familiar to her. She seeks to layer and juxtapose material and historical complexities to emphasize the ephemeral nature of memory. Her processes are a push and pull between a reveal and an erasure; they mimic ideas of how memory, especially collective memory, functions.