Embroidered Botany Workshop with Amanda McCavour
This workshop offers a unique opportunity to create directly with an exhibiting artist. Don’t miss this chance to explore the vibrant world of textile art, hand stitching and water soluble stabilizer with Amanda McCavour! Amanda’s work is on display in the Art Gallery from September 30 to February 20, 2024.
In this brand-new offering, Amanda will share the techniques she developed to create ethereal sculptures. Amanda’s work explores an often overlooked side of embroidery: the structural possibilities versus the inherent fragility of thread. Much of Amanda’s current work deals with natural systems and environments. She will translate environmental phenomena like clouds, flowers or ice into embroidery and share this exploration of the natural world through thread in this workshop exploring leaves, flowers and botany.
In this workshop, you will use Sulky® water soluble stabilizer by creating an embroidered botanical design held together with machine stitching and embellished with hand embroidery. Participants will create their own botanical design from reference drawings and will translate this into textile with collaging threads, wool and yarns with stitched line. Participants will learn how to work with water soluble stabilizer and will explore texture, pattern and line with hand embroidery to create a one-of-a-kind piece. Couching stitches, french knots and seed stitches will add colour and interest.
Registration Information:
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Public: $85 + HST, Members: $72.25 + HST (price includes a $25 material fee)
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Registration required, space is limited to 14 participants.
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Ages 18+, no experience necessary.
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This is an all-day workshop with a lunch break between 12 – 1. Food is available at local restaurants or you can bring your own lunch.
About Amanda:
Amanda McCavour is a Toronto-based artist who works with stitch to create large-scale embroidered installations. She is interested in thread’s assumed vulnerability, its ability to unravel, and its strength when it is sewn together.
McCavour uses a sewing machine to create thread drawings and installations. By sewing into fabric that dissolves in water, she can build up stitched lines on a temporary surface. The crossing threads create strength so that when the fabric is dissolved, the thread drawing can hold together without a base. With only the thread remaining, these images appear as though they would be easily unraveled and seemingly on the verge of falling apart, despite the works raveled strength.
Through an exploration of line and its 2D and 3D implications, stitch is used in her artwork to explore various concepts such as connections to home, the fibers of the body and more formal considerations of thread’s accumulative presence. Amanda’s work explores embroidery’s duality- its subtle quality versus its accumulative presence and its structural possibilities versus its fragility. Through experimentation and creation within her studio, she continues to investigate line in the context of embroidery, drawing and installation.
McCavour holds a BFA from York University where she studied drawing and installation and has recently completed her MFA in Fibers and Material Studies at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA. McCavour shows her work in galleries nationally and internationally with recent solo exhibitions in Gatineau (QB), Williamsport (PA) and Vancouver (BC). She has received grants and awards from The Canada Council for the Arts, The Ontario Crafts Council, The Toronto Arts Council, The Handweavers and Spinners Guild of America, The Ontario Society of Artists, The Surface Design Association and The Embroiderers Guild of America for her work.
