Year: 2007-2024
Dimensions: 30’ x 12’ (Dimensions Variable)
Medium/ Technique: Thread, Wool Roving, Organza, Wire, Linen, Pins/Machine Embroidery
“Sample Wall” is an archive of tests, experiments, and sketches spanning seventeen years of studio practice. Arranged to resemble wallpaper, this collection includes early undergraduate explorations from 2007 alongside recent samples for large-scale installations. The wall functions as both inspiration and record—a visual diary of my evolving relationship with thread, technique, and material possibility.
My process relies on sampling. Before embarking on any major work, workshop, or exhibition, I create tests to explore ideas, color relationships, and technical approaches. Some samples on this wall still retain the water-soluble base fabric, showing the structure before dissolution. Others have been carefully dissolved and ironed into pristine thread drawings, revealing the final form these works will take. Each sample represents a moment of discovery or problem-solving, a small decision that might inform something much larger.
As individual samples accumulate across the wall, shadows fall between them, details emerge, and the evidence of process becomes visible to the viewer. There are hundreds of stories embedded in these threads—some already realized in completed installations, others still waiting to be told. The wall becomes a kind of pattern book, but one that documents experimentation rather than standardization.
This installation offers a rare view into the usually private aspects of art-making: the trials, the accidents, the gradual refinement of technique. Where my larger sculptural installations present polished, ethereal environments suspended in space, “Sample Wall” reveals the accumulated labor and curiosity behind those illusions—the messy, essential work of learning what thread can do.
This work has been included in the following exhibitions:
Exhibition: Bright Little Day Stars at The Columbia Museum of Art Exhibition: Wanderings and Traces at Cambridge Galleries(links to be added)
Exhibition: Consumed by Clouds @ The Kootenay Gallery of Art
Exhibition: Memento @ AH! Arts & Heritage Centre
