Image credit: courtesy of the artist
Residency period: January - March, 2025
Laura Carwardine is an industrial designer and textile artist who has worked in industrial design, interior design and retail design. Laura is passionate about everyday design interactions, innovation, details, collaboration, prototypes, design process, embroidery and colour palettes. In her independent textile work, Laura focuses on using embroidery techniques in unconventional ways and at a magnified scale to make the details more visible. She enjoys exploring the intersections of industrial design and textile art and sharing the joys of embroidery with others as a tactile analog break from the digital world.
Great Friends 2023, Nylon Rope
Image credit: courtesy of the artist
Project Description
For her residency, Laura will create a large-scale textile installation featuring embroidered 3D printed elements. A metal grid will provide the overall structure, and custom printed pieces will fill the squares with pixelated colour. Each printed piece will have integrated holes, allowing it to be the substrate for embroidery with a variety of textile techniques and colours. The pieces can be stitched independent of the grid and then fit into place later as part of the overall composition, creating interest at a variety of scales. As part of the residency, Laura will be looking at examples of textiles, repetition and grid-inspired artworks in the AGO's collections to develop a conceptual language for her own practice and proposed collaborative project.
Embroidering the printed squares independent of the grid allows for the installation to be co-created with the public. Visitors can choose a printed piece, embroider it themselves, and add this piece to the overall composition. This creates opportunities for education around embroidery, colours, and textures.
