Gloves In Art: A Muse at Arm’s Length
Haley Bassett, Gauntlet, 2025. Vintage and contemporary, seed, pony and crow beads, vintage iron cut beads, thread, imitation sinew, and worn welding glove. 10.5 x 12 x 2 inches. Photography courtesy of Galerie Nicolas Robert.
My interest in gloves and how they’re used creatively first sparked when I saw a kidskin glove used in Marisol’s monumental mixed media work, The Party (1965-1966). It was on view at Montréal’s Museum of Fine Art in 2023 as part of a massive retrospective of the undefinable mid-century artist’s oeuvre.
Somewhat obscured and daintily held by, or, more accurately, affixed to the illustrated hand of one of her blockish sculptural figures, the glove’s presence is a captivatingly tactile emblem of the upper-class cohort the avant garde creative was skewering in her inventive installation.
“I never wanted to be a part of society,” the mononymous artist confessed in the text accompanying The Party. “I have always had a horror of the schematic, of conventional behavior. All my life I have wanted to be distinct, not to be like anyone else.”
Marisol used the pair of gloves – possibly hers, possibly found, possibly sourced – to convey a sense of conformity in her work; and hand-coverings, which we rely on for a range of activities and reasons, have been rendered by artists throughout history – ones who have been entranced by the glove, its narrative potential and multifarious symbolism.
Over the last year, I’ve spoken to several contemporary artists about how gloves fit into their respective practices. Most recently I had a chat with Haley Bassett about the gloves in her exhibition We Work With Our Hands, and below you’ll find an edited version of that interview. Following that, you’ll see excerpts of my previous interviews with artists about gloves, and where I first found these examples of their work.
A close-up of Marisol’s The Party that I took when it was installed at the Montréal Museum of Fine Art in 2023.
I’ve seen many glove-centric artworks in recent months because gloves, delineated in all manner of dimensions, are strongly suggestive. There are few accessories quite like them because they can signify decadence, innocence, kink, and utility, and many moods and functions in between.
In Max Klinger’s haunting A Glove series, a single white glove is dropped by a woman at a skating rink; the wayward accessory is figuratively animated and depicted in a set of eerie images that tell a fraught tale of imagined love in the mind of the man who picked the glove up. Heather Hess wrote of Klinger’s glove: “It assumes the attributes of Venus, born of sea foam and driving a shell chariot. An outsize version torments him in his sleep, recalling Francisco de Goya's prints. Klinger's grasp on the glove remains elusive, and a fantastic creature finally spirits the object away.”
Gloves have also been used in wholly material ways (no pun intended) to help artists make a point. Lorraine O’Grady’s phenomenal performance piece Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980) saw her wear a gown fashioned from 180 pairs of white thrifted gloves out to various art scene affairs in New York City; each ghostly hand a nod to the gentry that Black people like O’Grady would not have been a part of. Through this sartorial gesture within the vanguard performance work, O’Grady delivered a commentary on the prevalent racial segregation in New York’s art spaces while potently highlighting how what we wear denotes who we are.
Today’s artists also employ gloves both physically and pictorially to give shape to themes such as identity, discrimination, transgression, societal norms, and capitalism. In her recent show at Galerie Nicolas Robert in Toronto, interdisciplinary artist Haley Bassett included several glove-based pieces that have been phenomenally embroidered and beaded.
Gauntlet (2025), for example, is composed of a welding glove with the flourish of a Métis floral motif beaded onto its well-worn hide. Another work, The Rock Pickers, shows two petite gloves filled with and holding rocks in mid-motion; the gloves are embroidered with what Bassett describes as a common Métis chain stitch technique. The use of this linked pattern, she says, relates to the theme of genealogical connection that’s a larger subject in her show.
Haley Bassett, The Rock Pickers, 2025. Worn work gloves, embroidery floss, twill tape, cotton fabric, thread, imitation sinew, field stones. 7 x 13 x 6 inches. Photography courtesy of Galerie Nicolas Robert.
What each of Bassett’s reimagined gloves and their respective adornments illustrate is the tenuous and rare connection between identity and labour held by Métis people. The text for Bassett’s exhibition, called We Work With Our Hands, begins like this:
“Free trader, fisherman, farmer, hunter, gatherer, guide—the Métis Nation’s story is threaded through our evolving relationship with labour, moving between poles of alienation and agency. In We Work with Our Hands, I examine the multifaceted nature of Métis labour past and present and trace how our history is reflected in our current roles within the Canadian economy. How does our relationship to labour affect contemporary Métis cultural identity today? And what does it mean for the industrious Métis to decolonize labour within late-stage capitalism?”
I spoke to Bassett recently about the works in her beautiful solo show, some of which I saw for the first time at the recent Art Toronto fair; hot off the heels of that display, Galerie Nicolas Robert announced Bassett’s representation by the gallery – quite exciting news.
How and when did you start using gloves in your practice? Did you have a concept in mind first, and then we're searching for these types of gloves? Tell me about that process for you.
It’s almost like a chicken-and-egg situation. But what really kicked it off was when I did a workshop series in 2023 with Kaija Heitland and learned how to make traditional gauntlets. I liken them to work gloves, or I see work gloves, as a contemporary analog to traditional gauntlets. Work gloves speak to class, and that's something that I want to explore in my work.
What’s the provenance of the gloves we see throughout your show We Work With Our Hands?
The gloves in my show are all my own work gloves. Some of them are for doing chores around the house, but some of them I've worn while I was working in the oil and gas industry. I was interested in how the experience I’ve had working in resource extraction interacts with my Métis identity and exploring that through the idea of the gauntlet.
I then opened that concept up to Métis people more broadly because so much of how we interact with the land, or our like legal status, and our ability to protect and advocate for the land is mediated through all kinds of legal structures. Being Métis means you're partially recognized, depending on where you are in the country, so it’s a strange filter to have to contend with.
There’s also this notion of speaking to the present moment – of what our relationship with labour has been historically compared to present day.
When I look at your pieces, it also makes me think about who does labor intensive work – who those people are. And then the concept of human extraction comes in.
Absolutely.
Haley Bassett, Hunter-Seneca-Root-Gatherer, 2025, Worn work gloves, vintage and contemporary seed beads, cotton twill, imitation sinew, thread, cotton. 9 x 9.5 x 1 inches. Photography courtesy of Galerie Nicolas Robert.
Can you speak more about your time working in the oil and gas industry and how that came about? What has the evolution been in terms of how you think and feel of about that work?
I grew up in northeast British Columbia, which is essentially a gas field now – it wasn’t when I was growing up, and I witnessed that change. When that kind of activity started booming, it sort of became inevitable, in a way – so many people in that region work in oil and gas. It becomes normalized after a while; I call it the pipeline to pipelines.
There was a point when I felt pretty directionless, and in those moments, you can get swept up into things. I had a relationship that ended, and I needed a job badly; so I did it for five years. I was an herbicide applicator; I did pipeline reclamation, and I also did pipeline construction. It was different things throughout the season, but all in oil and gas.
These jobs have crazy hours – 14-hour days, seven days a week. You’re just getting by, day to day, and it’s like you’re in stasis. I once saw that period as lost time, but now I'm looking back at it as there being something quite profound about that experience. And in cases, something that’s relatable, especially to Métis people because so many of us end up working in resource extraction and it’s a very complex thing for us. I wanted to look into that further and find meaning in it.
When did you start doing embroidery and bead work and incorporating it into your practice?
I first learned how to bead in 2019, and I really got into it and started incorporating it into my art practice around 2020. Before that, I had made a couple of pairs of earrings and smaller things, but they didn’t have much of a cultural connection. Then I did a Métis floral for the first time, and it lit up my brain like nothing else has ever done. It totally captured me. It made me realize that this is what I need to be doing – this is my medium.
Applying bead work to gloves was interesting to me because it's an odd thing to create an art object by applying a craft to a mass-produced item. I think it's exciting, and kind of loaded. It has a lot of cultural and historic connotations too.
Métis people have a unique relationship to labour that largely sets us apart from settler and First Nations communities, in terms of how we structure our societies around labour – that's something I wanted to bring to the fore with this exhibition. And to use a “craft” in this work is a kind of pushback against capitalism. Beading and embroidery don’t fit on the capitalist timeline; it takes a long, long time to learn how to do this work proficiently and just completing the work itself is a test of endurance. So, it feels like a reclamation.
Let’s talk about the composition and meanings behind a few of the pieces in We Work With Our Hands.
I can start with Hunter-Seneca-Root-Gatherer. It’s a pair of work gloves that have been disassembled and then reassembled in a way that takes them away from what they were originally so that read differently. I have other series where I create masks, and I thought, well, I have to make at least one mask for this show.
There aren't really any Métis mask traditions that I'm aware of, but I'm interested in using them to explore identity because there's an element of showing and revealing at the same time. I find a lot of Métis culture kind of goes under the radar and isn't really recognized for what it is. And there's also a lot of complicated psychological elements to being Métis too, where people don't feel they're enough, or that they're hiding.
The title and theme Hunter-Seneca-Root-Gatherer refers to a form of labour organization that Métis people undertook where large groups of people would camp and gather Seneca roots, and that would be what they did in the summer. It’s also a migratory practice akin to the buffalo hunt. Here, I was focusing on the idea that through that action – through that labor – a community and identity was solidified.
Haley Bassett, The Rock Pickers, 2025 (detail). Worn work gloves, embroidery floss, twill tape, cotton fabric, thread, imitation sinew, field stones. 7 x 13 x 6 inches. Photography courtesy of Galerie Nicolas Robert.
And tell me more about the work The Rock Pickers – that was my favorite piece in the show. It’s very different from the other glove works in the exhibition because it has an additional element of materiality. There’s a beautiful sense of movement in this work as well.
This piece is about our history clearing land through something called the Scrips system, which was the Canadian government’s way of dispossessing Métis people of their land. And everything was implemented very poorly and in a corrupt way.
That tracks.
Instead of allowing people to get their land, the government used it to disperse communities. People were issued land that was very far from where they had been historically, from their communities and their families, and so that's one way of separating us. If people were “lucky” enough to be able to travel to the land they were assigned, which was a very expensive, arduous, and dangerous endeavour to begin with, once they were there they had to clear the land in order to keep it.
Because a lot of Métis people didn't have money for equipment, they had to clear everything by hand. And a lot of the time people weren't able to fulfill the clearing standard within the government’s timeline so they would do the work and then lose the land. A lot of the time it was then bought up by settlers, and the Métis people would have to start working for the settlers who bought the land that they cleared. It’s a devastating legacy. It’s also a unifying experience for Métis people; my dad grew up picking a lot of rocks on his family's farm, and I did my share as well in oil and gas. It ties into the idea of who does the menial labor in our society.
In terms of the gesture I’m articulating, the shape of the gloves is really given by the rocks here. The gloves are holding this literal and proverbial weight, but it’s also a very caring gesture. It kind of reminds me of a little baby bump, so again there’s a notion of generational impacts.
What is it about gloves that you feel make them a compelling narrative tool?
It starts with the Métis tradition of making gauntlets – I’m interested in exploring that material cultural aspect. Using worn work gloves, items designed for specific tasks and mass produced, carries with it the whole capitalist system. Hands and gloves are very evocative, and they communicate a lot in the way you position them. They’re very powerful.
Hannah Doucet on the use of gloves in her exhibition Exiting the Castle that ran until early February of this year at Gallery 44 .
Installation view of Exiting the Castle. Photography by LF Documentation.
Within this body of work, I'm thinking a lot about the space of Disney World. Within that space, there's a constant element of performativity and costuming. It's theatrics. That was the entry point for me in starting to think about the idea of being hidden, and of a person being underneath the costume of a character; I was thinking about a character being performed by a body underneath that.
One of the references to gloves in this show is green screen gloves, because green screen is a recurring visual trope. Wish-making is a theme in this exhibition, and green screen is a space where someone can wish, or project, whatever they want to on something – and the gloves are part of that. But these gloves also make you disappear at the same time.
Jeanine Brito on the use of gloves in her exhibition The Grumpy Girls that ran at Nicodim Gallery New York in the Spring of 2024.
Jeanine Brito, Opening Night (The Grumpy Girls), 2024. Acrylic on canvas. 81 x 120 inches.
Initially, featuring gloves in my work was an aesthetic decision because costuming is really important. I liked the glamour that it conveyed, and that there's a sensuality to their look as well. The gloves that I’ve been painting lately have been latex, so there’s a fetish quality to them and functionally they serve no purpose.
Then I started to consider that gloves are a barrier layer, or a layer for removal. You might touch something with a glove, but you're not really touching it. There's no tactile sensation for the wearer of the glove, and whatever's being touched isn’t actually experiencing the direct touch. That aspect feels very protective and in my work, I can be quite vulnerable but then there's always a layer that I keep just to myself. I think the gloves are symbolic of that.
In the large painting with the four figures all together where one is nude, she still has stockings and gloves on. She's supposed to be the most true version of all of these different versions of me in this work, but even so, there's a reticence to be fully nude. When I'm making my work, I'm in my studio, I'm in my world. The figures are me and they aren't me. They're larger than life.
Kyle Alden Martens on the use of gloves in his exhibition Spun Through The Heel that ran at Patel Brown Montréal in the Spring of 2024.
Installation view of Spun Through The Heel. Photography by B. Brookbank.
During my Master's, I was really curious to find some way to represent hands without having to have a hand present in some type of sculptural form. A glove is a quick solution to that. I wanted to make a glove that looked more like a hand than a glove, and I wanted the shape to stand as if a hand was in them.
I slowly built a pattern that I keep reusing, and I was thinking about touch and tension and massage – the intention is that these sculptures convey the sense of how a hand would push on the back of your shoulders, or the back of your legs in the form of a massage. These gloves that are perfectly formed to me become a stand-in for the body. I’m usually trying to find a balance between my work being personal yet also abstracted.
I find I’m often thinking about how nude hands are. A hand is something that we don't think of as being naked, except when it's covered and then uncovered and it creates that awareness again without really thinking about it. And there are different intentions for wearing gloves – either to beautify or to protect the body or to protect identity. There are so many layers to them.
Maria-Margaretta on her piece go help Grandma with the dishes (2021), which I saw for the first time at Art Toronto 2024.
Maria-Margaretta, Go help Grandma with the dishes, 2021. Yellow rubber gloves, seed beads size 10.
Go help Grandma with the dishes is a pair of yellow rubber beaded gloves featuring floral motifs and beaded fringe along the cuff. This piece was made during my time in lockdown at the initial stages of Covid-19 pandemic. I was running low on materials and was scavenging my house for possible beading surfaces, and I had these rubber gloves under my sink and decided to recreate a gauntlet-style Michif glove, adapted from my Grandpa Boucher’s gauntlets.
I was reflecting a lot on the resourcefulness of Métis women and homemakers, and their ability to make do with what was available to them. Coming from a resistance family, many male figures or war heroes were often held up in our histories and storytelling. With the rubber gloves, I wanted to use an everyday object and the meticulous labour of beadwork to highlight the unsung domestic labour of Metis women in my matriarchal lineage.
Rose Nestler on her piece Portal Glove (2023), a bronze edition with Bomma.
Rose Nestler, Portal Glove, 2023. Bronze. Light Patina and polish. 24 × 22 × 15.5 centimetres.
The glove really started to play a stronger role in my work in 2019, when I made a shirt and I needed a tool to hold it up off of the wall. I liked that it's the reality of a bodiless figure – just the glove of a someone reaching through a wall and holding something for us to look at.
My gloves are not delicate – they're almost always made out of leather, with a few exceptions. They're very sturdy. When you think about gloves throughout history, there's evening gloves and opera gloves, riding gloves, but leather gloves are mostly work gloves. I think that is something that has always interested me, thinking about the glove as a garment that represents labour and therefore is the stand in for my labour that it took to make it. Bomma’s team actually cast a stuffed leather glove for this edition. It was so cool to see the stitches, the texture of the leather, the buttons, even the stuffing. It's pillowy, and you almost feel like you could fit your hands in there.
I'm interested in the word stigma, and what that connotates. Generally stigmatized people throughout history have been women who broke the rules. And I am also interested in the spectacle of the stigma, specifically in Medieval Europe with nuns having stigmas show up. My imagination goes wild with the idea of these stigmatas that were showing up on women, and the whole lore around them and the power that it could bring them. So, I'm interested in how the stigma turns into a portal.
