In Conversation: Talking Textiles
Grant Heaps, Roda Medhat, and Jagdeep Raina

Join us for a conversation with artists Grant Heaps, Roda Medhat, and Jagdeep Raina, whose work is featured in Fuzzy Thinking.

Jul 3.2025

Time

6:30pm

Location 358 Gordon St, Guelph ON

Price Free

Join us for a conversation with artists Grant Heaps, Roda Medhat, and Jagdeep Raina, whose work is featured in Fuzzy Thinking. Each artist draws from traditional textile practices while pushing the medium forward through their own distinct iconographies, material approaches, and experimental methods. Rooted in cultural memory and everyday experience, their work engages deeply with the handmade—exploring how textiles can hold, transmit, and transform meaning across generations. This discussion will consider how each artist builds on textile traditions to create new forms of narrative, abstraction, and resistance.

Moderated by curator Shauna McCabe, the talk will offer insight into the role of textiles as both medium and method—reflecting broader conversations around identity, hybridity, and the politics of making.

Image details (left to right): Roda Medhat, Abattoir (detail), 2024, acrylic yarn. Courtesy of the artist; Grant Heaps, Stag (detail), 2004, cotton, wool, linen, and nylon. Courtesy of the artist; Jagdeep Raina, Garden Minorities (detail), 2021, embroidered tapestry with Kashmiri sozni, embroidered border on muslin. Art Gallery of Guelph collection.

About the artists

Roda Medhat

Roda Medhat is a Kurdish-born artist currently based in Toronto. He holds a BFA from OCAD University, where he focused on video art, photography, and sculpture/installation. He also studied film production at FAMU, the Film and Television School of Prague. Currently completing his MFA at the University of Guelph, his work explores displacement, cultural memory, and identity through layered visual narratives and multidisciplinary practices.

Jagdeep Raina

Jagdeep Raina is an interdisciplinary artist based in Queens, New York, and holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Through drawing, writing, textiles, and video, Raina explores historical memory and the plurality of diasporic histories. Originally from the Kashmir region, his family emigrated to Canada in the 1960s. Raina’s work frequently revisits and reimagines ancestral textile traditions such as Kashmiri and Punjabi embroidery, phulkari, and shawl-making as a means of cultural reconnection and resistance.

Grant Heaps

Grant Heaps’ textile-based practice draws on the imaginative possibilities of fabric. His work engages with themes of decay, impermanence, personal adornment, and home. A lifelong theatre professional, Heaps has spent over 30 years in the wardrobe department of the National Ballet of Canada. Bringing deep material knowledge and care to his artmaking, his work often incorporates discarded materials, reflecting a commitment to reuse and a poetic navigation of the everyday.