According to an ancient Greek myth, a mere mortal named Arachne challenged the goddess Athena to a competition to see who could weave the best tapestry. The brilliance of Arachne's work so outraged the goddess that she changed her into a spider, a creature doomed to weave webs that people destroy and never preserve or admire.

In the Making: Contemporary Canadian Tapestries at the Burlington Art Centre showcases five artists -- Sondra MacLeod, Jane Kidd, Line Dufour, Barbara Heller and Marcel Marois -- whose creations could easily make a goddess green with envy.

Weavers have been making functional and decorative cloth for more than 10,000 years. The handwoven wall hangings in the BAC exhibition give a traditional art form a contemporary spin.

Women in ancient Greece, who spun their own wool and linen, then used their looms to weave complex patterns and human figures engaged in mythological exploits into their cloth.

Some contemporary weavers such as Sondra MacLeod spin and dye their wool. She works with pale earthy tones that look almost ethereal. In Arctic Sketches (2007), flowers found in the North fill the surface, their low-lying forms competing for a brief burst of attention before they die.

Jane Kidd works with wool and likes to weave silk and novelty yarns into her wall hangings. Her style is more sharp-edged than MacLeod's soft, painterly approach.

In Possession: Imprint/Impact #3 (2007), Kidd assembles a variety of seemingly disparate motifs, ordering them into geometric compartments. Such an arrangement recalls contemporary patchwork and sculptural assemblages.

Kidd's cache includes a prehistoric image of a fertility goddess, a heart, a moth and old medical instruments, such as a scalpel and syringe. She's commenting on how we like to collect and classify things, juxtaposing natural objects with human-made ones.

In Departure, Voyage, Arrival (2001), Kidd's collection includes images of patterned fabrics that lend a luxuriant mood to the handwoven triptych. Her objects are ordered in a more naturalistic way: a low-lying table in the foreground and curtains open onto a three-dimensional interior space. On the far left, a hand, decorated with spirals, has set a top spinning. The effect is sheer poetry.

Line Dufour (2007) takes wall hanging to another level. In Divine Intervention, we see a long, horizontal abstracted landscape. Mountaintops rise in the distance. In front of them lies a vast variety of patterns and irregular shapes, some woven with yarn that glitters.

But that's not all. Part of the tapestry is pleated, and it juts out, reaching for the viewer.

In Gravity (2007), Dufour creates another dynamic piece in blues and magentas. The colours blend into one another in a subtle way, but the eight-foot-high work is loaded with drama. It hangs in three sections, apparently being pulled off the wall by its own weight.

There will be a reception, tour and talk by the artists at the BAC on Sunday, Sept. 9, at 2 p.m.

Regina Haggo, a former professor of art history at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com