About
Christina Margaretha is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the intimate terrain of womanhood, motherhood, and transformation. Working in the forests and grasslands of Southern Ontario, Canada, she creates site-responsive works that merge portraiture, textiles, and performance – centering the body in relationship with land, lineage, and time. Her process often unfolds alongside her daughter, weaving lived experience into visual narratives of healing and renewal across generations.
Originally working in painting and drawing, Margaretha’s transition to motherhood sparked a profound shift in her practice. As her understanding of herself and her place within inherited systems evolved, she moved towards textiles and lens-based media as tools for embodied reflection. In recent years, backstrap weaving has become central to her process as a symbolic, body-based method that grounds her work in rhythm, ritual, and ancestral memory. Across her work, she uses red yarn as both material and metaphor, evoking themes of connection, rupture, and repair.
Margaretha holds a BFA from York University (Toronto, ON), where she was awarded the Tim Whiten Award for excellence in the visual arts. Her ongoing series has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent highlights including a solo exhibition at Thus Gallery (Toronto) and a six-woman show at the Aurora Cultural Centre. Last fall, she completed her second lens-based artist residency at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts on the Toronto Islands.
Margaretha is currently represented by MELT Studio + Gallery.
Artist Statement
My art begins with questions I carry in my body – about womanhood, lineage, and the stories we’re taught to believe. Raised in a strict religious tradition, I absorbed patriarchal beliefs that diminished the female body, silenced inner knowing, and severed the sacred from the feminine. Motherhood brought those messages into sharper focus, and I became determined to disrupt this harmful legacy.
Working with photography, video, and textiles, I create staged performances in natural landscapes that reflect a personal journey of healing and reclamation. I look to nature not only as a collaborator but as a guide, its cycles of growth, decay, and renewal echoing my own. Nature’s dynamic intelligence helps me unearth parts of myself buried under inherited shame, offering a more grounded and sacred understanding of the body.
Much of my work explores the mother-daughter relationship as the first place we learn what it means to be a woman, and as a space where those meanings can be questioned and reimagined. Collaborating with my daughter allows me to give form to these ideas. Her presence in the work helps me embody the questions I’m asking: How do we unlearn inherited wounding? How do we create new rituals of care and connection?
Backstrap weaving with red yarn is central to my practice. With this technique, my body becomes part of the loom, echoing the rhythms of nature – tension and release, unraveling and repair. The yarn and woven elements appear throughout my work as tactile traces of transformation, linking land, lineage, and memory in quiet rituals of resistance and becoming.
Christina Margaretha 2025
A Contextual Note on Backstrap Weaving:
Backstrap weaving is a technique rooted in Indigenous textile traditions across the Global South. My engagement with it is grounded in deep respect for its ongoing cultural significance and the knowledge keepers who have sustained it. I approach this method not as a claim to that lineage, but as a symbolic, body-based weaving practice. The use of a rigid heddle to create a balanced weave distinguishes my approach from traditional warp-faced techniques and resonates more closely with domestic wool weaving traditions from my own Northern European ancestry. I work with this technique in a spirit of gratitude, as it enables me to explore themes of maternal lineage, healing, and agency through slow, embodied acts of making.
As a woman of settler descent, I would like to acknowledge that my art was created on the traditional territory of the Ojibway, Huron-Wendat, and Haudenosaunee. I thank them for sharing this land where I live and work, and I commit to walking alongside them with respect and care for this land.