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.
Image credit: courtesy of the artist
Project Description
Laura will explore the intersections of embroidery and 3D printing and create a
large-scale interactive textile installation in Walker Court. The overall composition is inspired by aerial views of the Canadian prairies and will be created on a large yellow freestanding metal grid. Custom 3D printed perforated pieces will fill the grid with pixelated colour and will be embroidered with a variety of textile techniques, which reference the textures of different plants and trees. Visitors can interact with the installation by embroidering one of the printed pieces with yarn and adding it to the composition.
Laura has lived in Toronto for many years, but she often flies back to Calgary to visit her family, enjoying the aerial views of the green and yellow patterned prairies in the process. This past summer, Laura drove from Toronto to Calgary and back to finally see this landscape up close (and so that her dog could travel too). The colours of this textile installation are selected to reference this environment and the variety in textile techniques relate to the variety of textures visible when both flying over and driving through this landscape. As part of her residency, Laura will be looking at examples of textiles, repetition, and grid-inspired artworks in the AGO collection to evolve the conceptual language for her own practice and proposed collaborative project.
