Fern Facette's Symptomatology
Neurodiversity through the lens of weaving

Fern Facette, “Meta Weave,” 2025, wool (photo by the artist)
Fern Facette’s solo exhibition, Symptomatology — on view at the Alberta Craft Council Discovery Gallery in Edmonton, Alta., now through July 12, 2025 — fills the space with intricate, woven wall hangings, playful primary colours and plush, tubular tangles.
Facette began this series of work a few years ago, while doing a residency at Yorath House in Edmonton. There, paired with a musician and sound artist, Matthew Cardinal, she was inspired by the vintage interfaces of his synthesizers, a web of interconnected cables. She wove a series of red, yellow and blue tubes that she coiled into a brain shape, which she wore for a final performance at the end of the residency. Symptomatology expands on this work and explores Facette’s neurodiversity through the lens of weaving.
“There’s something really specific happening with weaving,” says Facette. Using a floor loom is a physical, full body experience. The shuttle goes back and forth, hand to hand. There’s a repetitive pattern to the cycle of movements. It is an embodied practice.
“I was using weaving to cope with my undiagnosed ADHD for 20 years,” says Facette.

Fern Facette, “Data Refinement 2,” 2025, wool (photo by the artist)
Bilateral brain stimulation is a process that can regulate the nervous systems of people with ADHD. Exercises can involve moving one side of the body, then the other — like tapping your right hand on a table, then your left, in a repeating pattern. While watching a video on these exercises, Facette realized that it was like weaving without a loom. She calls weaving a “full body bilateral brain stimulation exercise.”
Woven wall hangings like Data play with duality and doubling. Done in a technique called double weave, the warp — the vertical threads on the loom — was made of two layers, a white layer on top and a colourful one underneath.

Fern Facette, “Reset,” 2025, wool (photo by the artist)
Facette manually picked up colourful threads from the bottom as she wove, to create a complete inverse of the image on the backside of the piece. The brightly coloured squares in Data form a pixelated staircase, the reverse side hidden from view against the white of the wall.
In soft sculptures like Meta Weave, Facette also used the double weave technique, this time joining the two layers to create whole tubes of fabric in colours straight out of a child’s crayon box. The work is playfully looped together into a large woven sculpture, twisting tubes organized into a magnified weave, almost like a blown up diagram from a book.
On the opposite wall, Unravel, is a loose, sculptural knot of bright yellow, red, navy and pale blue tubes that coil together, merge and separate. This tangle of colour contrasts with the tidy pattern of Meta Weave. Auditory processing can be a challenge for Facette, and Unravel captures that struggle to take in data and information. Though the two sculptures appear in binary opposition, Facette thinks of these different states, orderly and unraveling, as constantly being in flux.
In addition to her personal practice as an artist, Facette runs Fern’s School of Craft in Edmonton, teaching, mentoring and bolstering support for the craft community. Her initiatives, such as a fully funded rug tufting artist residency, have allowed many local artists to experience different fibre mediums and create exciting new work.
“It feels really awesome to talk to other folks about what kind of textiles they want to make,” says Facette. “Without having that bridge to other communities…it wouldn’t be as exciting.”
“It’s really satisfying to have that on top of my own practice.” ■
Fern Facette: Symptomatology, is on view at the Alberta Craft Discovery Gallery in Edmonton, Alta. until July 12, 2025.
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Alberta Craft Gallery
10186 106 St, Edmonton, Alberta T5J 1H4
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