Based in Montreal, Haitian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist Stina Baudin combines textile, sound, written text, and archival data to represent Black and Afro-diasporic identity. She describes her approach as bricolage, a mixed media practice that transforms readily-available materials into a composite work.
In an interview with The Tribune, Baudin shared how she became involved in textile-based art.
“After I graduated university, I took a trip to Cambodia alone, and I stumbled upon a collective of Cambodian women weaving. I didn’t know what the loom was back then, and we didn’t speak the same language, but I just sat there for hours watching them weave [….] I was fascinated by the loom itself,” she said.
Baudin incorporates found objects, multicoloured beads, and a wide range of fibres into her textile pieces, allowing her to innovate beyond the inherent capabilities of fabric. In this way, she practices bricolage—not only within her textile practice, but also by combining her weaving with writing or sound.
According to Baudin, this innovation is intimately related to the political intention of her work.
“I wasn’t interested in just aesthetics or creating something for a [function]. I was interested in developing political themes within the work, and fabric […] [has] its own language [for doing so],” she said. “It’s found in almost every culture. Fibre arts, as a medium, […] [is] not just cotton. It can be cables, hair, anything fibrous, depending on where your imagination brings you.”
Her latest work, The Sky Still Carries the Stories, epitomizes her portfolio’s signature emphasis on bricolage. Installed on the roof of the Adélard barn in Frelighsburg, Quebec, the piece is a tapestry depicting a night sky in black and indigo thread, with hand-sewn mirrors forming its stars.
Baudin described how the project began with the intention of commemorating the site’s Black history and community.
“The story goes that there were Black people in America who took the Underground Railroad […] and found themselves in Frelighsburg,” she said. “This barn is 100 years old […] [and] in speculation, it could have been a place where Black people lived and worked, like many of the barns in the town.”
The architectural location of The Sky Still Carries the Stories grounds the work in the town’s Black history, while simultaneously forcing the viewer to gaze up at the tapestry-adorned roof from their place on the ground.
“When I first looked at the barn from the back side, […] the backdrop was the sky [….] I was instantly reminded of […] the stars that guided [Black people] to freedom,” Baudin said. “[I see] stars as a place where we can think [of] our ancestors in the sky, watching over us, divinely protecting us.”
In their research at Adélard, Baudin’s team discovered several Black historic residents of Frelighsburg who had lived in the town, but were not named in its archives. Baudin highlighted the inherent complexities of remembering individuals whose histories are unrecorded or hidden behind unmarked graves.
“There were 220 Black people [who] lived there at some point, but there were not 220 names in the archives, so I started thinking about […] how to account for this absence of names, […] how to commemorate all these people that are unnamed and [buried] in graves that are unnamed, some that exist on private property,” she said. “This [was] my first large-scale project, and it was a great exercise for me in terms of taking up space […] to make a history that hasn’t been visible, visible.”
The Sky Still Carries the Stars is also accompanied by a soundscape, which combines a musical composition by Markus Floats with spoken-word poetry and sporadic, out-of-order counting.
“I had personally recorded Black Canadians […] counting numbers at random, and I thought about these numbers as being representative of the names that were not found in the archives […] [and] the scatteredness of not being found and not being known,” she said.
Baudin’s work gracefully weaves unknown Black histories into the threads of the present, depicting Black identity through her signature bricolage approach.
The Sky Still Carries the Stories is on display at Adélard until Nov. 2, 2026.