Short Summary: My latest exhibition at Thames Art Gallery explores the longing of distance through two immersive blue embroidered installations. Date: January 2024 The Blue Afar opened at Thames Art Gallery on January 26, 2024. Running through March 24, 2024, this solo exhibition featured two major installations that explored the physiological, cultural, and metaphorical meanings of the colour blue through my embroidered sculptural practice. The exhibition, curated by guest curator Matthew Ryan Smith, opened during Chatham’s Winter ARTcrawl. Creating The Blue Afar was an exploration of how embroidered environments can express the infinitesimal breadth of human emotions and shape our relationship to earth and sky. The exhibition takes its name from Rebecca Solnit’s observation in A Field Guide to Getting Lost: “The world is blue at its edges and in its depths.” She writes of being moved by “the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away.” Blue exists in the most distant places: where the horizon meets the sky, in ocean depths, at the edges of our vision. Solnit suggests that blue is not just a colour but an emotion—”the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in.” This concept became the foundation for the work: How do we materialize the beauty of distance while maintaining its essential quality of being forever beyond our grasp? Far Away Blue Fields The largest installation attempts to materialize the blue of distance itself. A constellation of powder blue orbs resembling cumulus clouds floated above a vista of azure flowers suspended from the gallery ceiling by...
In 2024, I completed Garden of Clouds, a large-scale embroidered installation for Tok Eats café in Taipei City, Taiwan. This 25′ x 20′ x 6′ suspended work hovers above visitors, transforming the interior space into an imagined cloud made of flowers. The project presented a unique challenge: the installation was mapped out and installed by a team in Taipei while I remained in Toronto, consulting daily over Zoom and phone calls to guide the process from thousands of miles away. Working with Foison Art, I created Garden of Clouds through an unusual collaborative process. While I developed the concept, created all the embroidered elements, and designed the overall composition in my Toronto studio, the actual installation happened half a world away. Each day during the installation period, I joined the team via video call, watching as they positioned pieces, discussing adjustments, and problem-solving together across time zones. This long-distance collaboration required trust, clear communication, and meticulous planning. Process drawings and installation tests became essential tools for ensuring the final work would match my vision. Looking at those initial drawings now alongside the completed installation, I’m pleased with how closely the piece corresponds to what I imagined. After the installation was complete, I flew to Taipei for the opening event—my first opportunity to see the work in person and experience it as visitors would. Standing beneath Garden of Clouds in the café, watching how it transformed the space and how people moved underneath it, was deeply rewarding after months of viewing it only through screens. During the opening, I discussed how the work was made and gave a small demonstration...
One Sentence Summary: My installation Floating Garden is paired with Jannick Deslauriers’ Phasmes to explore humanity’s journey from botanical abundance to environmental devastation. Date: September 2023 This fall, I had the privilege of exhibiting at the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives (PAMA) in Brampton, Ontario as part of In Her Garden, a dual exhibition that explores humanity’s complex relationship with the natural world. Running from September 30, 2023 through February 20, 2024, the show pairs my work with that of Montreal-based artist Jannick Deslauriers, creating a powerful narrative contrast between flourishing beauty and environmental devastation. The Exhibition In Her Garden presented two radically different visions, each filtered through a feminine lens that imagined hybrid realms between reality and fantasy. My contribution, Floating Garden, filled the gallery with a romantic, vibrant garden suspended from above. Using only thread, I created stitched drawings of flowers that sprouted mid-air—each bloom soft and slight, swaying gently as visitors moved through the space. The flowers responded to the disturbance of bodies passing by, gracefully shifting in unison with their neighboring blooms, creating the illusion of a living garden complete with an imagined fresh scent permeating the space. In stark contrast, Jannick Deslauriers created Phasmes (Phasmids), a world drained of colour and life. Her mixed media installation evoked an abandoned amusement park, a nuclear disaster zone reminiscent of Chernobyl, or a war-torn landscape. Visitors entered this “contained space” through a plastic curtain, confronting the sad conclusion of environmental tragedy—whether caused by human neglect, error, or explosive aggression. Where my work celebrated botanical abundance, hers mourned its absence. Together, our installations created a narrative arc...
Short Summary: My new installation Floral Canopy transforms native New York plants into hundreds of suspended wire sculptures that create a floating wildflower meadow. In August 2023, just as students and staff prepared to enter their new building for the first time, Floral Canopy was installed in the lobby ceiling of the Albee Square Campus in Brooklyn. This site-specific public artwork represents the culmination of a four-year journey that began in 2019—a project that deepened my understanding of how art can honor place, celebrate local ecology, and create a sense of belonging for the communities that encounter it daily. Floral Canopy is composed of hundreds of hand-shaped, powder-coated steel sculptures painted in vibrant greens, yellows, and oranges that form a floating field of native plants above viewers’ heads. Like three-dimensional drawings, these intricately crafted and gestural wire forms accumulate into a suspended wildflower meadow—shifting perspective and inviting students, teachers, and visitors to look up and discover a garden where they might least expect it. The foundation of this work lies in botanical research and careful observation. I spent considerable time at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Native Flora Garden and the New York Botanical Garden’s Steere Herbarium, examining plant specimens that call New York home. I made dozens of drawing studies of local species including May Apple, Button Bush, Milkweed, and many others—plants that have adapted to this specific climate and soil, plants that have their own stories within this ecosystem. This process of documentation became integral to the artwork itself. By translating scientific observation into artistic interpretation, Floral Canopy demonstrates how different ways of knowing—the scientist’s careful cataloging and the artist’s imaginative rendering—can work in harmony....
Short Statement: My new Domestika course is now available online! Date: August 2023 In November 2022, I traveled to Madrid, Spain, to film an online course with Domestika. Over the course of a week, I worked with their production team to create a comprehensive guide to starting free-motion embroidery. The course was released in August 2023, and it’s been exciting to see students from around the world discover these techniques. Filming an online course is a different kind of creative challenge than making artwork. Instead of working alone in my studio, I spent the week explaining every step of my process to cameras, breaking down techniques I’ve developed over years into clear, accessible lessons. The Domestika team in Madrid was incredible—professional, supportive, and genuinely interested in understanding the work so they could help communicate it effectively. We filmed everything from setup to finished pieces, capturing close-ups of stitching techniques and wider shots that show how individual elements come together into the larger project. It was an intense week of demonstrating, explaining, and occasionally re-filming to make sure every detail was clear. The course guides students through the entire process of creating embroidered designs using free-motion embroidery techniques on a sewing machine. I start with the fundamentals: gathering materials, creating mood boards, and developing designs inspired by natural elements. Then we move into the technical aspects—setting up the sewing machine for free-motion work, understanding essential stitch patterns, and learning to shade, accent, fill, and outline designs. The beauty of this approach is that it’s accessible to beginners while offering techniques that more experienced sewists might not have explored. I also...
