Kilowatt Kate + Khadija Aziz: Gathering Light
Kilowatt Kate and Khadija Aziz collaborated on this DesignTO Juror’s Choice Award-winning piece for Kate’s ALL LIGHT exhibition, co-curated with Common Good Studio.
Khadija Aziz is a textile artist who explores manipulation in textiles through imagery, patterns, and materiality, both with digital and physical methods of manipulation.
With Gathering Light, this manipulation is more about the form of the cloth and manipulating the fabric. Pushing what cloth can be while exploring how light impacts the work. This piece of Canadian linen achieves its texture through a hand stitching technique called ‘Arrow’ Canadian Smocking, which took Khadija over 20 hours to complete.
Pricing Available Upon Request
About Khadija Aziz
Khadija Aziz is a Toronto-based artist and educator. Her practice is rooted in textiles, a medium that carries histories of labour, migration, and cultural knowledge. At its core, Khadija honours and revives slow craft traditions through collaboration with technology or public audiences. Her work is about transformation and memory with a growing focus on how personal and cultural narratives migrate and shift across generations and geographies.
Khadija has exhibited and been published internationally, with awards and grants from Craft Ontario, the Surface Design Association, Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts. She is currently a writer-in-residence at Esse Contemporary Art Magazine and an artist-in-residence at Harbourfront Centre’s Textile Studio.
About Kate Tessier
Kate Tessier is an Industrial Designer and the founder of Kilowatt Kate, a collaborative curatorial craft and design practice focused on lighting, material reclamation, and experimental generative product development. She has been Senior Designer-in-Residence at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto since 2023. With two decades of experience in product design, Tessier develops both functional and decorative hardware, custom architectural lighting, and locally produced craft and design. Through these projects, she combines curatorial practice with hands-on design. Tessier’s work, meticulous material exploration blends with collaborative design, emphasizing functionality, aesthetics, and sustainable approaches in contemporary practice.
KILOWATT KATE 