Common Thread Hook-Ins
Common Thread Hook-Ins are a series of free, public rug hooking gatherings designed to make a traditional (and traditionally working-class) art form accessible, social, and intergenerational. Through these series of hook-ins, community members will help create a large collaborative rug depicting the coastal landscape of the St. George peninsula. Rug hooking has deep roots in Maine and the Canadian Maritimes, and Common Thread Hook-Ins create a space where anyone from children to older adults, and beginners to artisans, can sit together, share cultural knowledge, and contribute to a shared community piece.
Artist Bio
Amelia MacDougall is a rug hooker from the Tantramar region of the Canadian Maritimes, who is currently based in midcoast Maine. Her work explores the moments of recognition that occur between humans and animals- brief encounters where something passes between species. Although her rugs rarely depict people, the viewer is always present as the rug becomes the meeting place where human and animal worlds touch. Amelia’s practice avoids anthropomorphism and instead treats animals as autonomous subjects, often drawing on myths to explore themes of transformation, autonomy, and embodied tension. Her process is intuitive and materially responsive, influenced by Maritime and Maine rug hooking traditions and by her commitments to the natural world. She works with fibers imbued with human and animal histories: wool, worn farm clothes, and reclaimed materials linked to rural domestic life. Her work is shaped equally by animal “traditions” like migration, hibernation, death, and by her own embodied presence in the studio. Hooked rugs are objects/artworks traditionally used to keep out winter drafts from a home's front door, and literally soften the boundary between home and wilderness. Likewise, Amelia’s practice extends that gesture beyond the threshold of the door, softening the boundaries between human and non-human animals, the domestic and the feral, narrative and material worlds. Each piece is an attempt to engage in the reciprocity that allows us to belong to the world, not as its owners, but as its participants.
Image caption: Amelia MacDougall Fleming, An Owl is Mostly Air, wool, burlap, cotton, 6’x5′, 2025. Photographed by Nola Logan.