Short Statement: My installation Ode to a Prairie at Royal Botanical Gardens creates an immersive pathway through floor-to-ceiling panels.
Date: January 2025
My work is currently on view at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington as part of Of Wonders Wild and New, a fibre art exhibition curated by Cobalt Connects that runs through the end of the month. The exhibition brings together nine contemporary fibre artists from around the world, with works that explore the broad themes of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—playing with scale, movement, wonder, dream states, otherworldly beings, and the sense of being fully immersed in an experience.
For this exhibition, I installed part of my work Ode to a Prairie, which consists of large panels featuring printed embroideries. What made this installation unique was the approach: rather than suspending the panels overhead as I typically do, the pieces were hung to extend almost to the floor, creating a pathway down the middle that allows visitors to walk through the work itself. Instead of looking up at a field hovering above, visitors find themselves surrounded—immersed within the piece. The panels create walls of flora on either side of the path, enveloping viewers in embroidered prairie plants. You don’t just observe the work from outside; you enter it, move through it, and experience it from within.
This installation method speaks directly to the Wonderland themes the exhibition explores. Like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole or stepping through the looking glass into a world where familiar things become strange and scale becomes fluid, walking between the panels creates a sense of being transported into another realm. The prairie plants, enlarged and rendered in embroidery and print, tower beside you—monumental versions of what might otherwise be overlooked in nature.
The pathway through the middle invites a kind of journey. You’re not a passive observer standing at a distance, but an active participant moving through an environment. This shift in relationship between viewer and artwork creates exactly the kind of immersive experience that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland evokes—that feeling of being inside the story rather than reading about it from outside.
Ode to a Prairie celebrates the often-underappreciated beauty of prairie ecosystems—the native grasses, wildflowers, and plants that create complex, biodiverse environments. By printing embroidered studies onto large-scale panels, the work magnifies these plants, giving them the monumental presence they deserve. The combination of embroidery and print allows for both the gestural, handmade quality of stitched line and the bold graphic impact of large-scale reproduction.
I’m grateful to Cobalt Connects for curating this exhibition and for the opportunity to install Ode to a Prairie in this immersive way. It’s a reminder that the same work can create entirely different experiences depending on how it’s positioned in space and how viewers are invited to engage with it.
Of Wonders Wild and New
Royal Botanical Gardens, Burlington, Ontario
Curated by Cobalt Connects
Part of Alice in Bloomland floral showcase
Featured work: Ode to a Prairie (detail), printed embroidery on fabric panels
