TEXTiles 2025

TEXTiles, This is not an AIDS Quilt exhibition at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, Sept.11-Dec.6th 2025

In the last decade, Andrew McPhail has produced an ongoing body of textile-based work that draws from his experience as a queer man living with HIV for over 30 years. Developing out of his drawing practice, McPhail’s work evolved into a hybrid straddling sculpture, installation, and performance. Utilizing readymade disposable materials, ranging from Band-Aids to Kleenex, his accumulative work pointedly examined failure, sexuality, and the frailty of the human body. Text has always played a critical role in his work, but over the last decade McPhail was increasingly drawn to the gaudy impermanence of brightly coloured sequins as a medium for his humorous, often caustic slogans. Sick & Tired. Fragile. Epic Fail. The End. Obsessively hand-stitching his sequined texts onto bed sheets, pillowcases, and quilts, the sum of McPhail’s ongoing project evokes a metaphoric bedroom, a place of comfort, security, compassion as well as passion, but also of sickness and death. TEXTiles knowingly honours the emotional and material impact of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, a monumental collective undertaking honouring the names of all those lost to the AIDS epidemic. McPhail’s iteration is a more modest, personal production; a self-deprecating portrait of an artist willing to make light of their own survival.


exhibition text by Ivan Juraki
​photos by Scott Lee