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...
Year: 2018-2022 Dimensions: 16’ x 16’ x 10’ Medium/ Technique: Thread/ Machine Embroidery Poppies explores the fleeting nature of this emblematic flower by rendering and preserving the moment of the poppy in bloom through thread. This installation invites viewers to walk underneath a suspended poppy field, shifting the traditional perspective of a garden and creating a surreal moment suspended in time. The work engages the multiple associations and symbolism of poppies—from sleep and healing to remembrance and death—while also referencing the repeat patterning found on floral fabrics and wallpapers. What began as a commission of one hundred flowers, hanging and photographed to commemorate the centenary of the First World War’s end, has expanded into hundreds of embroidered poppies hung upside down from the ceiling, creating a dreamlike environment where these delicate forms become keepsakes, memories, and tender reminders of life, time, and space. The poppy has long captivated gardeners with its colourful varieties and showy blossoms, yet it carries deeper cultural weight as a symbol laden with meaning. One can imagine cheerfully frolicking through these poppies or pausing to commemorate a fallen warrior; perhaps even lying on the floor and looking up at this lush meadow will cause one to drift into slumber—after all, poppies loomed large in the Land of Oz. This mysterious field is not created to unsettle but to draw viewers in, spark curiosity, and encourage engagement. The diaphanous installation skillfully plays with associations of duality, presenting an alternative perspective to both drawing and embroidery—where delicate thread structures capture the ephemeral beauty of blooms that exist only briefly in nature, now preserved and monumentalized in a...
Year: 2018 Dimensions: 14’ x 40” x 30” (Dimensions Variable) Medium/ Technique: Thread,/Machine Embroidery “Pink Field, Blue Fog” begins with the space of the garden and the artifice of silk flowers, transforming these ideas into an immersive landscape of color and light. Thousands of embroidered pieces suspend from single threads, creating an abstracted field of flowers beneath a hovering cloud. The installation invites viewers to move through pathways winding between vivid neon pinks and blues, experiencing the work from multiple perspectives—walking among the suspended blooms or lying beneath them to look up through layers of glowing color. Each small component is created using my water-soluble fabric technique, building up stitched lines that hold together without backing once dissolved. Installed at varying heights throughout the gallery, these pieces accumulate into a dense, three-dimensional environment that transforms the interior space into something unnatural and hyperreal—a faux landscape that pulses with synthetic brightness. The electric pinks and blues deliberately evoke the artificial—the garish glow of plastics and the exaggerated colors of digital screens. The installation creates an enveloping sensory experience, surrounding visitors in chromatic intensity. I am interested in how movement shapes perception—how walking through the work, pausing within it, or reclining beneath it offers fundamentally different encounters with the same space. The pathways don’t simply provide access; they choreograph experience, making the viewer’s body an active participant in completing the work. In this way, the installation exists somewhere between sculpture, environment, and performance, activated by each person who enters and moves through its glowing, impossible field. This work has been included in the following exhibitions: Exhibition: Wanderings and Traces at Cambridge...
Year: 2023 Dimensions: 17’ x 8’ (Dimensions Variable) Medium/ Technique: Thread, Wool Roving, Organza, Wire, Linen, Pins/Machine Embroidery “The Horizon, The Ocean, The Sky” materializes the blue of distance—that elusive color found at the edges of what we can see, where earth meets sky, where the visible world dissolves into atmosphere. This installation invites viewers to inhabit a blue reality that typically exists just out of reach, bringing the remote beauty of horizons and ocean depths into immediate, immersive proximity. Each element is created by sewing into water-soluble fabric, building up layers of stitched line before dissolving the base to leave only interlocking threads. The resulting forms—flowers, leaves, birds, bees—suspend in space without backing, held together solely through their accumulated connections. This work has been included in the following exhibitions: Exhibition: Bleu Ciel at La Sarre Art GalleryExhibition: The Blue Afar at the Thames Art GalleryExhibition: Bleu Ciel at Centre...
Title, Year: Living Room, 2010-2011 Dimensions: 10′ x 10′ x 10′ Medium/ Technique: Thread/ Machine Embroidery **Produced with the support of the Ontario Arts Council Living Room is based on my living room in the apartment where I lived from 2010-2011. I recreated many of the objects that existed in that space—chairs, side tables, and other knick-knacks—out of thread, mimicking the space in my old home like a stage set or enlarged shoebox diorama. The objects act as a trace or record of a space that used to exist, capturing not just the physical forms but the memory of inhabiting that room. By rendering everyday furniture and belongings in thread, these delicate reconstructions exist between presence and absence, solidity and fragility. They are simultaneously there and not there—visible yet ephemeral, recognizable yet transformed. Part shrine, part monument, the thread drawings act as tribute to a room that once was. The work explores themes of memory, loss, and the passage of time—how we hold onto places that have shaped us even after we’ve moved on. The painstaking process of recreating each object stitch by stitch mirrors the way memory itself works: selective, laborious, and ultimately incomplete. What remains is not the room itself, but an artifact of remembering—a constellation of objects that once held daily life and now hold only the echo of it. This work has been included in the following exhibitions: Exhibition and Workshop: Schweinfurth Art CenterExhibition: Embroidered Environments @ Hub Gallery, Penn State UniversityExhibition: Day Dream @ The Okotoks Art GalleryExhibition: Living Rooms @ The Glenhyrst Art Gallery of BrantExhibition: Rooms @ The Appalachian Center for Craft...
Year: 2011-2013 Dimensions: 12’ x 8’ x 16’ Medium/ Technique: Thread/ Machine Embroidery Accumulate explores forming thread embroideries into three-dimensional bloom-like forms that reference silk flowers, spirograph drawings, and underwater creatures. These abstracted flower pieces are a playful exploration of materials and structure, where the accumulation of line becomes sculptural. Created using water-soluble stabilizer, each unit is individually embroidered and shaped, then suspended to create a floating constellation of forms. Neon greens were chosen for their vibrant, artificial quality—a colour that hovers between natural and synthetic, organic and manufactured. The work invites viewers to consider how repetition and accumulation transform simple stitched lines into complex sculptural presence, while the bloom-like forms suggest multiple readings: botanical specimens, mathematical patterns, or fantastical sea creatures suspended in space. Through this accumulation of handmade units, the installation creates an immersive environment where embroidery escapes its traditional two-dimensional surface to occupy space with movement, shadow, and light. This work has been included in the following exhibitions: Exhibition: Diaphanous Embroidery @ 108 Contemporary Exhibition: Wanderings and Traces at Cambridge...
