Grant Heaps might spend his nine-to-five painstakingly caring for the ornate costumes of the National Ballet, but his real passion lies in the one-dimensional world. “I love the flat surface,” says Heaps. “Or even two dimensions in ways that don’t have to fit to a body or something. There’s a freedom in that.” He discovered this love—obsession, he calls it—about 10 years ago, long after leaving fashion school and settling in at the National Ballet as assistant wardrobe coordinator, where he refits, repairs and organizes all the costumes for shows like the upcoming staging of Romeo and Juliet. “I always really loved dressing, getting dressed,” he says. “So I put the two together and assumed fashion was what I should do.” But over time he fell out of love with clothes, and in it with textiles. The textures, the weaves, the patterns, tracking down scraps and cheap fabrics at Goodwill, Value Village, even in the garbage: he craves all of it. “I love using the most beautiful fabrics with the most truly awful stuff,” he says. “And combining them together, trying to make the hideous beautiful.”
Heaps creates works that stick in your memory for ages. At 2009’s Radiant Dark, a design show put on by west-end showroom Made, he exhibited an enormous tapestry based on a vintage cross stitch pattern of a deer, made out of 20,049 one-inch squares of scrap fabric. This week he’s taking part in the Textile Museum’s reDesign auction of re-imagined Louis XVI style armchairs by 36 local artists and designers; in true one dimension-loving fashion, he thinks of the chair as a preliminary “sketch” for a large crochet quilt he’s working on, using doilies layered under images of a roller coaster and garden, as well as pop song lyrics. And for City of Craft’s big craft sale in December, Heaps is creating a large tapestry based on a floral needlepoint out of lace and organza, evoking a stained glass mirror.
He’s hoping to exhibit during the Do West show during design week this January; last year, he hung a quilt in a meat and cheese shop off Dundas. “I like hanging things in retail locations. Sometimes your work looks better in places like that. Galleries can be so sterile, so off-putting in a way.” While he’s always thinking about getting more into the design world, potentially playing with more 3-D furniture pieces in the future, he’s got a new endeavour on the burner for the new year—a short film using his textiles and stop-motion animation. “I’m kind of obsessing about it,” he says. “It would be very much about the quilts. I’d built up a set and put myself in it, and have animation happening all around me.”
The self-described textile worker (his choice of words—he likes the labour intensive connotation and gender neutrality of it in a field dominated by women) loves designers Yves Saint Laurent and Madeline Vionnet, artist Henry Darger (“every time I see his work I just kind of tremble I’m so excited”) and Little Edie Beale from Grey Gardens—a hodgepodge of influences that makes more and more sense the deeper you explore Heaps’ body of work. Let’s take a look.
Grant is known around town for his delightful, natty, Willy Wonk-y ensembles. Here, he poses at a round table covered in his own work.
Heaps learns the technical ins and outs of sewing from the ballet’s wardrobe designers. “I’m watching all the time. I love watching how the designers put things together and use fabrics. It’s not so much the garment itself as it is the combination of colour and texture that has always inspired me.”
Here are some fabric swatches in a pleasing mix of blues.
And some creepy-cute collectibles.
A lightly crumpled, hand-drawn quilt pattern.
A plain wooden chair covered in beautiful textiles Heaps made from reclaimed quilts.
All photos by Marina Dempster.
