Olivia Mae Sinclair is a textile artist who embraces sloppy craft, designing and creating fabric books, prints, and other works of art. She utilizes personal, political, and academic analysis through her practice, often exploring trauma, gender, memory, the body, infatuation, and intense emotion. Her work and methodology mirror each other in a profound way: raw, messy emotions laid across fabric, with raw edges shaped through cutting, ripping, and fraying.
Olivia also works as a post-secondary instructor and frequently facilitates trauma-informed intuitive sloppy craft workshops. Much of her facilitation is community-based, including sessions with groups of survivors of sexualized violence, frontline workers, and youth.
Olivia can articulate years of feeling, experience, fear, desire, and dreaming onto a piece of fabric or a page of paper. Her work invites viewers to engage with their whole bodies, tactile pieces you can touch, pick up, flip through, and feel in more than one way.
As a person and as a friend, Olivia is in many ways the personification of her artwork, and not simply because of her preferred gothic palette and style. Like her art, Olivia is real, raw, sometimes sloppy, kind, understanding, creative, and constantly searching for and building meaning. There is a vulnerability and openness in her art and herself that reminds people we are not alone.
This makes her not only an exceptional artist, but an exceptional person.
-Written by Micah Kalisch, dear friend
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Which ’hood are you in?
I currently split my time between Oakville and Hamilton. I was an Artist in Residence at Harbourfront Centre for four years; I teach at OCAD University, and I’m a member of Centre[4] in Hamilton. Most days I joke that I actually live on the GO Train because I seem to spend an unreasonable amount of time travelling between cities for teaching, exhibitions, studio work, meetings, and whatever art-related adventure I’ve committed myself to.
What do you do?
I make fabric books, screen print, sew, teach, write, drink Red Bull, love, cry, and occasionally answer emails.
My practice centres around sculptural textile books and soft objects that combine screen printing, photography, sewing, and text. I use images I’ve taken alongside my own writing (or attempts at poetry) to create work that explores mental illness, trauma, vulnerability, relationships, memory, and the messy realities of being me. My work is ultimately compulsive, healing, and for myself, but I leave room for others to enter it.
My work is intentionally imperfect, confessional, and always a little sloppy. I’m interested in creating objects that invite viewers to slow down, touch, unfold, and engage with stories that are difficult to articulate out loud. Most of my work is black and white, and I’m drawn to strong contrasts, rich textures, repetition, and layering; visual qualities that often mirror the emotional themes I’m expressing.
What are you currently working on?
Right now I’m in that strange and exciting transition between summer art fair season and the start of the academic year. I’m preparing lectures and course materials for OCAD University and Sheridan College while simultaneously trying to keep my studio practice alive between PowerPoint slides.
In the studio, I’m producing work for upcoming holiday markets and developing several exhibitions planned for early 2027. These projects continue my exploration of fabric books and soft sculpture, focusing on domestic objects, keepsakes, and everyday materials as vessels for memory. I’m interested in how familiar objects can hold emotion, history, comfort, grief, and attachment. As always, there will probably be a lot of screen printing, sewing, and overthinking involved.
Where can we find your work?
You can currently find my work at Craft Ontario in Toronto’s Distillery District, in the Art Gallery of Ontario gift shop, at various art fairs and exhibitions throughout Ontario, and occasionally at holiday markets where I can usually be found surrounded by fabric scraps and caffeine.
You can also visit my website or follow me on Instagram to keep up with new work, exhibitions, workshops, and the occasional behind-the-scenes studio chaos.
