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Tour of Craft within The 2026 DesignTO Festival
Follow Craft Ontario's guide for a self-led tour of the craft-focused events and exhibitions in the 2026 DesignTO Festival. For 10 days every January, Toronto is transformed with The DesignTO Festival, celebrating design as a multidisciplinary form of creative thinking and making.
Find the Tour of Craft map here! Check the links to each individual exhibition site for address details and visiting hours. Preview our highlights below for what you can be excited to see from this craft edit of DesignTO!
Shao-Chi Lin is a Toronto-based fibre artist from Taiwan, who holds a Master of Fine Arts in Textiles from the Parsons School of Design. Lin transcends the structural limitations in weaving, exploring the possibilities of iterative events and patterns through woven structures. Guided by intuition and yet balanced with methodical discipline, her sculptures are meticulously crafted with woven textiles using paper yarn and natural dyes.In her sculptural exploration, Lin delves into ambiguous impressions and intuitive feelings evoked from engaging with the logical principles of waves. Her woven sculptures prompt communication between the two worlds of observed scientific facts and subjective understandings. The objective of her work is to awaken and nurture the acute sensory perceptions, inviting viewers to become more introspective of their own visceral responses, however subtle or delicate.
‘Articulated Hides’ explores the techniques of leathercrafting through sculptural form. Stitching, moulding, and dyeing have all been done by hand to create a dynamic form across its space. Leather – a material from waste – has been a part of our history for thousands of years. It is durable and, when cared for, can last a lifetime.
Leather is used for bags, objects, furnishings, and sculptures, all of which can be blurred together. The techniques for crafting remain the same while the form of the final piece can vary dramatically. Christian Maidankine has completed his Masters of Architecture at Toronto Metropolitan University and is now an Artist-in-Residence at Harbourfront Centre. His background in architecture and interest in making has led to his exploring various materials, mainly leather.
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Rolling Shutters, Julian Gregory
163 Sterling Road (Everything Gallery, entrance via Coffee by JOY), Toronto
A rolling shutter is a mechanism for capturing the light of an image line by line. Each line captures just one moment, producing a collage of timestamps rather than an instantaneous image. This illusion of a unified whole is found all throughout nature, where the span of a hundred years may be represented in one slice of wood.
This exhibition presents a series of light fixtures that show a line by line exposure of wood’s qualities. Solid wood panels are cut deep enough for light to diffuse through the surface. The result is a rigid structure contrasted by the organic grain of the wood. The unpredictable nature of the wood’s knots results in some blocking light and others appearing almost gemlike. When off, the fixtures appear as opaque pieces of wood.