Garden
Size 40” x 60” framed in a white Shadow box
Canvas – Thread
$2,400
Donated by the artist
Amanda McCavour
Amanda McCavour is a Canadian artist who works with stitch to create large-scale embroidered installations.
McCavour holds a BFA from York University where she studied drawing and in May 2014 she 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 Ottawa (ON), Virginia Beach (VA) and Vancouver (BC) and has completed residencies at Harbourfront Centre’s Textile Studio in Toronto, and the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, Yukon. She has received numerous awards and scholarships from the Ontario Crafts Council, The Canada Council for the Arts, The Handweavers and Spinners Guild of America, The Ontario Society of Artists, The Surface Design Association and The Embroiderers Guild of America.
Artist Statement:
In my work, I use a sewing machine to create thread drawings and large scale installations. By sewing into fabric that dissolves in water, I 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. I am interested in thread’s assumed vulnerability, its ability to unravel, and its strength when it is sewn together.
Through an exploration of line and its 2-d and 3-d implications, stitch is used in my artwork to explore various concepts such as connections to home, the fibers of the body and more formal considerations of thread’s accumulative presence. I explore embroidery’s duality- it’s subtle quality versus it’s accumulative presence and it’s structural possibilities versus it’s fragility. Through experimentation and creation within my studio, I continue to investigate line in the context of embroidery, drawing and installation.