Editors note: I’m pleased to announce that Lina Revere will join the Vantage Art Projects team as a writer and contributor of reviews and texts. We look forward to Lina’s poetic eye and generous spirit – Jennifer Mawby, Vantage Art Projects.
My process – Lina REvere
I would describe my writing style as conversational, deeply engaged, and materially driven—I write with artists rather than about them. My work is rooted in slow observation and thoughtful exchange, favouring essays and interviews that unfold organically rather than rigidly structured criticism. I’m drawn to artists whose work carries a sense of intimacy, urgency, or material intelligence, whether in the form of textiles, ceramics, or figurative painting.
I often begin with the tactile, describing the texture of a brushstroke, the weight of a ceramic vessel, or the way light shifts across a textile. From there, I expand outward, connecting materials to memory, labour, and the politics of making. I believe that surfaces are never just surfaces; they hold histories, gestures, and stories that resist easy categorization.
Since I balance writing with work and caregiving, I prefer to correspond with artists through email conversations rather than traditional studio visits. This allows for a more reflective and considered exchange, giving artists the space to articulate their thoughts in their own time and words. I avoid didactic writing, instead letting my pieces feel like an unfolding dialogue between maker and writer. I’m especially interested in what artists return to again and again—whether that’s a material, a subject, or a question that won’t let them go.
My essays balance poetic reflection with sharp critique. I never shy away from the politics of art-making but always centre the artist’s lived experience. I resist the pressure to make artists’ work “fit” into marketable trends or institutional narratives, instead seeking to amplify the personal, the experimental, and the unresolved.
Ultimately, I see writing as a way of holding space for art and creating room for complexity, contradiction, and depth. I write not to explain but to extend an invitation to look, feel, and think more deeply.
About Lina
Lina Revere (b. 1987, Vancouver, BC) is a writer, critic, and artist working at the intersection of craft, feminism, and contemporary art. Her essays and interviews explore the politics of decoration, the tensions between art and labour, and how material histories shape our everyday lives. She is particularly interested in how artists use pattern, figuration, and materiality as sites of resistance, memory, and reinvention.
Lina lives and works on the unceded, ancestral territories of the Semiahmoo, Kwantlen, Katzie, and Tsawwassen First Nations in what is now called White Rock, BC. As a person of settler origin, she acknowledges the ongoing impacts of colonialism on these lands and is committed to amplifying the voices of Indigenous artists and cultural workers in her writing.
She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Women’s Studies with a minor in Contemporary Art. While her academic training gave her the critical tools to dissect structures of power in art and culture, it was her hands while working in clay, dyeing fabric, sketching patterns late at night that pulled her toward the work she writes about. She currently works in the commercial design world, navigating the uneasy space between creativity and commerce, making sense of how aesthetics are packaged, sold, and consumed.
Based in White Rock, BC, Lina balances writing with parenting a small child and maintaining her own ceramics and textile practice—though “practice” often looks like patching a torn dress or throwing a lopsided bowl between meetings. She is keenly aware of the gendered demands on time, and perhaps because of this, she conducts most of her interviews over email, exchanging slow, thoughtful correspondences with artists who similarly work in the margins of their days.
Her writing has appeared in various independent art publications. She is less interested in grand institutional narratives than in the quiet, deeply felt urgencies of artists working in shared studios, home workshops, and community spaces.
When she’s not writing or working, Lina can be found wandering the coast with her child, collecting bits of driftwood, shells, and textiles worn thin by time. She believes in the radical potential of the handmade and the necessity of beauty as a form of resistance.