The Healing Art of Colour
by Margaret Tessman
Fabric artist Shannon Fraser describes herself as “a little old lady who lives in the wilderness in the mountains on a lake near Kimberley,” but she is so much more than that.
A former registered nurse who was forced to abandon her career due to illness, Fraser found her artistic self as she worked through the lengthy process of healing from chronic fatigue syndrome. “While trying to heal, I decided to use the creative part of my brain to give myself hope and passion,” she says. “Colour therapy was one of the modalities I used to help with the healing process. Colour has powerful energy frequencies that affect us on many levels.”
Fraser began her creative journey by learning to weave baskets, then dabbled in oil, acrylic and watercolour painting, and eventually gravitated to batik, which she had first fallen in love with during her travels around Southeast Asia in the 1970s. Batik is an ancient art form that uses hot wax as a resist and fabric dye for colour. While visiting Thailand in 2009, Fraser encountered a women’s group on a small island teaching basic batik, and her passion was ignited.
Wanting to learn more, she returned the following year to Bangkok, where she was given a two-week private course with a local artist, Jaa. Fraser then found artist Kiranada Sterling Benjamin, who taught the ancient Japanese batik techniques ro-kata and rozome. She then studied one-on-one in Toronto with Ugandan-Canadian artist David Kibuuka. Kibuuka specializes in batik portraiture and what he calls a “modern batik” technique. To add even further to her repertoire, Fraser learned gyotaku, Japanese fish rubbing, from Mya DeRyan. Fraser’s piece combining batik with a fish rubbing using a local trout won an honourable mention at a local juried art exhibit.
“I finally had all the tools I needed to get going, so my very supportive husband built me an art studio,” she says.
However, everything changed when Fraser’s friend Colleen Bowers of We Be Jammin asked her to tie-dye a tablecloth for her market table. She discovered a new passion when she saw the joy that her colourful tie-dye garments brought to people, especially during the bleak days of the pandemic. Fraser advocates for tie-dye as a legitimate art form and had a month-long solo exhibition of her framed tie-dye art and functional pieces at Centre 64 in 2023. She has opened her studio during the Columbia Basin Culture Tour and continues to sell her work at markets and the Two J’s Café in Kimberley. Fraser particularly loves it when kids come into her farmers market tent with big smiles and make a 360-degree turn, taking in all the colours.
Fraser continues to evolve by learning and applying new techniques and ideas to her repertoire. The latest design she has been working on is created with an ice dye technique. By adding ice to a powdered fabric dye blend, the dye splits and creates beautifully unexpected variations of colour.
Living and working off the beaten track is just the way Fraser likes it. As she walks through the forest around her studio every day, she gathers inspiration from her wilderness home.
