Raegan Moynes is an interdisciplinary artist based in Regina, Saskatchewan. She holds an MFA from the University of Regina and a Bachelor of Design in Fashion from Toronto Metropolitan University. Working primarily in soft sculpture, installation and performance, she uses worn garments as raw material to explore themes of identity, memory, care, and transformation. Her background in fashion and costuming informs her tactile, labor-intensive approach, which embraces sewing, mending, unmaking, and repetition as ways of thinking through the body. In her work, clothing is a site of intimacy and endurance, bearing the weight of daily life, memory, and transformation. They are second skins, soft shells, emotional and material archives.
Her MFA work engages with trauma, not as a fixed narrative, but as a process to be inhabited – materially, physically, and often absurdly. She embraces the dissonance between inner experience and external form, where overwhelming emotions might be stitched into a 1,000 ft tubular form (Worm). Through gestures of care and refusal, she reclaims labor traditionally dismissed as domestic or invisible. There is a quiet humor in these gestures – a recognition that the act of processing pain can be tender, circular, excessive and even a bit ridiculous.
This work considers the politics of disclosure and the expectations placed on women to transform pain into something useful, something instructive, something digestible. Her work resists this type of resolution. She investigates what it means to reveal without testimony, to be witnessed without being consumed.
Her most recent work is shaped by the experience of new motherhood, which has deepened her investigation into bodily autonomy, attachment, and the quiet, relentless demands of care. It has brought both rupture and expansion. Motherhood is not sentimentalized, but approached as a site of intensity, exhaustion, attachment, ambivalence, and transformation.
Through textiles, soft sculpture, and installation, her work considers the complicated relationships between bodies: the physical closeness of caregiving, the loss and negotiation of bodily autonomy, and the ways identities can become entangled with the needs of others. Domestic materials and processes become sites through which these experiences are explored. Sewing, repair, repetition, accumulation, and acts of making carry both tenderness and frustration, care and compulsion.
Rather than seeking resolution, the work remains with contradiction. It considers motherhood as an experience that can simultaneously produce profound connection and isolation, love and rage, expansion and disappearance. These tensions emerge materially through imperfect construction, visible seams, tangled threads, repetition, softness, weight, and forms that appear to strain against containment. The work asks how care might be made visible, and what remains when the structures intended to offer comfort begin to fail.
She is an active member of the Regina arts community, with a specific passion in teaching and sharing creative experiences with others. When she is not working towards her art practice or caring for her family, you can find her teaching foundational 3D art sessionally at the University of Regina and contemporary dance with the magical folks at FadaDance.