Year: 2015
Dimensions: 2.5’ x 1’ x 1’ each (Dimensions Variable)
Medium/ Technique: Thread, Wire/ Machine Embroidery
In my work, I use a sewing machine to create thread drawings. By sewing into water-soluble fabric, I build up stitched lines on a temporary surface. The crossing threads create structural integrity so that when the fabric dissolves, the thread drawing holds together without a base. With only the thread remaining, these images appear fragile and seemingly on the verge of unraveling, despite their actual tensile strength. I am interested in this paradox—thread’s assumed vulnerability, its potential to come undone, and the resilience it gains when sewn together.
“Moving Boxes” recreates the cardboard fruit boxes I used to move my belongings from Toronto to Philadelphia and back again. Constructed at 1:1 scale, these highly decorated moving boxes are sewn flat and then assembled into three-dimensional forms. Through my water-soluble fabric technique, I render these solid, utilitarian objects transparent—transforming the opaque container into something you can see through, something that reveals rather than conceals.
The work explores the intersection of labor, movement, and value. Cardboard fruit boxes are mass-produced objects designed for transit and disposal, marked with colorful graphics that advertise their contents and origins. By meticulously recreating them in thread—a process that requires hours of careful stitching—I invert their disposability. The contrast between embroidery’s associations with craft, domesticity, and slowness, and the box’s purpose as a vessel for commerce and rapid transport, creates a tension between permanence and ephemerality, care and efficiency.
These boxes also hold personal resonance as containers of transition, marking the physical act of relocating a life between cities. Empty yet present, transparent yet structured, they embody the paradox of moving: carrying everything while remaining unrooted, containing memories while suspended between places.
Photographer: Cheryl Rondeau
