Bonnie Datta

Available at the Alberta Craft Gallery - Edmonton & Calgary

“Learning to embroider with my grandmother was the start of my lifelong interest in the textile medium as a creative outlet. Upon my first encounter with handweaving on a loom I knew I had found my passion. With its very structured skill set and its remarkably mathematical underpinnings, weaving became the thing I wanted to learn everything about - to experiment with all of the variables. Now, almost thirty years into it, I continue to revel in the fact that I learn, improvise and achieve – all while creating textiles with integrity in design, materials and workmanship.”

Originally from Saskatchewan, her family relocated to a farm in Alberta in 1952. Bonita completed a B.A. in Mathematics at the University of Calgary and went on to complete an M.Sc. in Mathematics at the University of Rhode Island, USA. Applying mathematical principles, Bonita explores the pattern and structure of woven textiles through proportion, series, symmetry, tessellations, and randomness.

She now lives in the same little farmhouse that her family moved to when she was a child, and spends most days designing woven pieces, making warps, dressing looms (threading, slaying, tensioning the warp), weaving and finishing her one-of-a-kind scarves, shawls, wraps and throws.