Netsanet Shawl: From Earth to Art

Netsanet’s practice is rooted in the belief that materials carry memory of land, labour, and the bodies that shape them. She works with clay and natural grasses, such as cattails, creating sculptural vessels that explore themes of cultural identity, migration, and ancestral knowledge. Alongside studio experimentation, she has been researching clay gathered from Winnipeg, integrating it into her work to reflect on the relationship between place, process, and cultural memory.

Born in Ethiopia and now living in Canada, she draws from both cultural lineages to create works that exist in between: between vessel and sculpture, between permanence and fragility, and between memory and presence. She is particularly inspired by the ceramic traditions of Ethiopian women potters; the basket weaving techniques passed down in her family, and the Indigenous craft forms she first encountered when she arrived in Winnipeg. These practices inform how she approaches her materials as both substances and collaborators in cultural translation and storytelling.

Each piece she creates begins with a dialogue with the land, the material, and the history it they holds. Whether hand building, coiling, firing, or weaving, she allows space for slowness and repetition, echoes of domestic and ancestral labour. She weaves grasses into her forms, or traces basket patterns across surfaces, allowing the two mediums of clay and fibre to speak across geographies and generations. These are gestures are of care, memory, and continuity.

Her work seeks to reclaim and elevate traditional women’s knowledge, challenging craft and fine art hierarchies. Through her vessels, she offers a space for reflection on how the handmade can hold stories of resilience, belonging, and cultural continuity, and how art grounded in land and labour can reconnect us to the histories we carry in our hands.

Netsanet Shawl is an Ethiopian-born, Winnipeg-based artist. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) and is currently completing her Master of Fine Art at the University of Manitoba.

In 2022 her work was included in Fresh Paint at Art Mur Gallery in Montreal, and this year has appeared in the exhibition Formed Impressions at Martha Street Studio as well as Wonder, part of the recent University of Manitoba Science Rendezvous. She is currently preparing for an international exhibition organized by the ITSLIQUID Group in Venice, Italy.