Year: 2022 Dimensions: 16’ x 16’ x 10’ Medium/Technique: Powder Coated Hand Bent Wire **Produced with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Bloom translates the mathematical roulette curves of Spirograph toys into sculptural wire lines that combine the playful gesture of drawing toys with the radial patterns found in textile structures like crochet rings and tatting. I am drawn to wire for its lightness, the shadows it casts, and its capacity to exist as both line and form. This interest in mathematical patterning embedded within textile traditions results in a hanging, mobile work where each circular form is individually shaped and suspended, creating a dense collection of fine lines arranged in the gallery ceiling. The installation presents a floating cloud of colour in bright blues, pinks, and purples—a vivid atmosphere of saturated lines that suggests simultaneously a galaxy, a bouquet of flowers, and a surreal cloudscape. Viewers are invited to move around and beneath the work, experiencing how it shifts subtly with air currents and transforms from different vantage points. This work has been included in the following exhibitions: Exhibition: Bright Little Day Stars at The Columbia Museum of Art Exhibition: Bloom at The Lake of the Woods Museum Exhibition: Wanderings and Traces at Cambridge...
Year: 2011-Ongoing Dimensions: 25’ x 20’ x 9’ (Dimensions Variable)’ Medium/ Technique: Thread, Machine Embroidery **Produced with the support of The Ontario Arts Council, The Surface Design Association and la Maison des métiers d’art de Québec In my work, I use a sewing machine to create thread drawings. By stitching into water-soluble fabric, I build up layered 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 surprising resilience it gains when sewn together. “Floating Garden” emerged from my fascination with idealized spaces and dreamlike environments. The installation addresses the history of botanical themes in traditional embroidery, liberating flowers from the confines of embroidery kits and pattern books to create an immersive, experiential space. While researching English embroidery, I noticed the persistent recurrence of certain flowers—buttercups, English asters, daisies, and other blooms common to North America. These standardized motifs became the foundation of this piece, though it felt essential to interpret them anew, creating my own versions rather than reproducing historical patterns. In “Floating Garden,” I have extracted these flowers from their original contexts—the samplers and botanical illustration books where they were catalogued and contained—and reintegrated them into a simulated garden environment. The installation transforms disembodied embroidery motifs into a spatial experience, surrounding viewers with suspended, stitched forms. The work exists in a state of tension: delicate yet...
Year: 2023 Dimensions: 12’ x 8’ Medium/ Technique: Thread/Machine Embroidery “Neon Herbarium” draws from pressed flower specimens native to Ontario that I studied at the Wisconsin State Herbarium. The work investigates the intersection between scientific documentation and decorative tradition—specifically, how botanical forms migrate between herbarium sheets, embroidery samplers, and textile patterns. The vivid neon greens and yellows I’ve employed push these botanical forms away from the muted, aged tones of preserved herbarium specimens and into the realm of synthetic materials—evoking the artificial brightness of plastics and their unsettling presence in contemporary environments. Each piece is created by sewing into water-soluble fabric, building up dense layers of stitched lines and crossing threads. When the fabric dissolves, the thread drawings hold together through their own interlocking structure, suspended without any backing. This technique mirrors the subject matter: just as plant ecologies function as interconnected biological networks where individual organisms sustain each other through invisible bonds, these thread works depend on accumulated connections to maintain their integrity. This work has been included in the following exhibitions: Exhibition: In Her Garden at the Peel Art Gallery Exhibition: Wanderings and Traces at Cambridge...
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....
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...
