Arts and Entertainment

Fibre art and Fibonacci patterns featured in new exhibit at Paul Morin’s Alton art gallery

June 18, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Fibonacci, wondrous fibres and fundamental math are on display at the Paul Morin Gallery in an exposition running for two months, until July 26.

Located on Main Street in the village of Alton, the historic Alton Town Hall was purchased in 2015 and, over three years, refitted by Caledon artist Paul Morin. Since then, he has been a leader in innovative exhibits and musical events. He said that it has been an evolution.

Even given the high standards of this beautiful venue, the current show sets a new high in content and its connection to the human soul. Two main aspects of the exhibition dominate this show’s interest: the brilliant Fibre Art and the thrill of Fibonacci, followed by the spinning pendulum’s omnipresence in nature and art.

There is, as well, a village in Laos.

Morin has a friend, Edmundo, a gifted healer Morin calls him, who over the last couple of years has been visiting a village in Laos, a country in Southeast Asia, and has befriended people there.

“He has been paying for kids to go to school and meeting the women there who make fantastic silk and dye pieces,” Morin related in an interview this week with the Citizen.

“One piece takes a year to make because they can only do a couple of passes per day, for the fabric is so delicate.”

Edmundo took great care in packing pieces of this work for transport to Morin’s gallery. Morin was clear that this would benefit the village, a definitive statement that the Fair Trade aspect of these treasures is firmly in hand.

“We are floored by the quality of this silk,” he said, offering the image of the women who raise the silk worms themselves and take the fibre from the cocoons to make these phenomenal pieces.

The Paul Morin Gallery had an incredible spring season this year, with good numbers of visitors showing up and buying to a degree unusual for the time of year.

Morin is stepping up the gallery to support certain artists as regulars and with his scheduled social media blasts. He noted that a satisfying number of people are connecting online without necessarily having been targeted by the gallery’s list of subscribers. They participate in shows at the gallery, Morin prefers that the invitation comes from him, finding a group pre-curating the shows and involving them.

A broader number of people are looking for more connection in painting as well as other art forms, and Morin agreed that more light shone at this point.

With the stunning piece by Pat Hertzberg, a Fibre Art, titled AFTERLIFE- her work is well illuminated to show all the qualities; is all transparent to see the life and movement within.

A Medieval Italian mathematician, Fibonacci who lived in the 12th and 13th centuries, when a boy, studied calculation with an Arab master. Later, he became renowned for introducing the Fibonacci sequence to Europeans in1202.

To simplify, the Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two preceding ones: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on. It is a fundamental corner of architecture, dating back thousands of years, when it was naturally the key to design long before Fibonacci identified it.

This number sequence appears everywhere – not only in nature, such as in the spirals of sunflower heads, shells, some vegetables and so on. It is found as well in the spirals of cosmic formations, small and very, very large.

As a species, we irresistibly copy nature and the forms we see over our heads. In the many cases of seeing these spirals and longing to reproduce them, Paul Morin talked about how a quantity of paint and a pendulum, skillfully released, fulfill the wish and lead unerringly to making art.

Somewhere along the line, an irrational number stands as “The Golden Ratio.”

“The building blocks of nature,” Morin called it. “It takes a long time to prepare the pendulum but then it does what it does and it is fantastic.”

There are some elements of control over how the pendulum makes its spirals, the length of the string to which it is attached, the density of the paint, and the duration of any one string. Morin has tried opposite directions and realized that all the motion comes from the spinning string and the Earth.

“The natural degradation of the spinning,” Morin observed, “that whole time like those who can dance at the edge of the skill and yet not falling. For this show, a month is not long enough– now it is on for two months. It takes two months to curate.”

Their music will be at the opening this Saturday, June 20, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. A number of artists will attend, refreshments served – wonders to admire.

To what is the most thrilling in this collection, Morin answered, “Because it was going to be just having a silk made by a woman living in a single thatched hut, put in a package – I could smell the village – so evocative – and view the amount of work on the same panel – no repetition- the colour just breath-taking from a primitive space.

“The execution is so intuitively shared.”

The Paul Morin Gallery is located at 19741 Main Street, Alton.

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