Collect 2022 Artist Spotlight: Amanda McCavour
A few weeks ago, we introduced Collect 2022, an art fair organised and produced by Craft Council that’s filled with collectable artworks focusing on craftsmanship and reimaginations of traditional crafts. Taking place at the end of February at Somerset House in London, there will be a few Canadian artists presenting new works that we’re looking forward to seeing.
We previously interviewed Toni Losey, a ceramicist based in Nova Scotia whose fantastical sculptures reference the breadth of nature that our earth and its seas have to offer. As promised, this week, we’re spotlighting Toronto-based artist Amanda McCavour, whose work with stitch has produced some of the most mesmerising installations we’ve seen in recent years.
Amanda’s use of water-soluble textiles and colourful threads produce delicate yet striking embroideries that transform into dynamic sculptural entities. For Collect 2022, she has created an installation of multi-tonal poppies that cascade from the ceiling, an emblem of remembrance and beauty rendered in machine embroidery. Represented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery from England, if Amanda’s breathtaking installation is any indication, the 18th edition of Collect Art Fair is going to be the highlight of our February. Read our conversation below to get to know her unique methods in creating art, the materials she uses and what she’s interested in exploring when conceiving her artworks.
Portrait of Amanda McCavour in studio. Photo by Christine Lim.
Sandy Yu: Great to see a fellow graduate of York University's BFA programme. How has this degree informed your practice? I know many artists come into their own really during their MFA, but I wondered whether this first degree set the stage in any way for the direction you'd eventually take?
Amanda McCavour: That’s a really fun coincidence, Sandy! I came to using sewn lines through an interest in drawn lines while pursuing my BFA at York University. The conceptual bend of their art program was something that appealed to me throughout my time there. In 2006, I was taking a drawing course with Professor Michael Davey, where drawing was defined simply as line. When I was taking this class, the whole world became a drawing. I thought that it would be interesting to make a drawing that only existed out of thread, but I wanted it to exist without a base, so I needed to find a way to do this. That is really where my interest in the medium began.
I had a visual problem or challenge for myself that I wanted to solve. So my questions were: How do I make a piece that only exists out of sewn line? What materials would allow me to do this? How much thread is needed to hold a work together? And later on, what does the material mean and what is its relationship to the image?
I was very interested in line and that is how I came to make the work that I make now. I have always loved drawing and when thinking about line in its simplest sense, as a line, I began to think about how threaded line is interesting because it appears flat but it is actually a sculptural line.
Early on, during my undergraduate degree, I thought that thread was a fitting material when speaking about the body and its temporality. There's a delicacy to the body that I felt connected with thread as a material. I was drawn to thread and its relationship to the body as well, how we know textiles through touch, how connected cloth is to the skin. I was also interested in how these thread pieces appeared so fragile and just about to unravel. I thought that this connected with the body as well, how temporary and fragile we are.
My work has since moved beyond the body, to temporary spaces that bodies occupy, and towards more playful exercises and experiments that explore atmosphere and wonder, but my experiences at York University and specifically my class with Michael Davey were fundamental to my direction.
SY: Could you elaborate on the types of fabrics and materials you use, i.e. why the water-solubility?
AM: I like the idea of creating a line in space and the water-soluble material allows me to do this with thread.
The strength in the work comes from the connecting points where sewn lines meet. So, while I’m stitching with my sewing machine to create an image, I’m also creating structure. This is something that is both interesting and challenging!
There’s also a bit of magic working with the water-soluble fabric – an unexpected movement that happens with the thread work when it is submerged in water. I am energized by this unpredictable process where the threads move away from their surface.
Poppies Detail 2, 2018 - Ongoing. 12’ x 40” x 30”, Thread, Machine Embroidery, Gallery Stratford, Stratford, Ontario. Photographer: Cheryl Rondeau.
SY: In recent works of yours, there have been a lot of beautiful botanical motifs. Is there a particular tradition or history you're referring to in using these?
AM: I’m often inspired by things that are related to memory and looking back. This is a common theme that I can also see in the pieces inspired by botany. It is important to me that the subjects relate to the material of thread somehow – either its delicacy or transparency, like how the use of thread to render floral motifs relates to their delicacy, the prevalence of botanical designs in embroidery and surface design as well as silk flowers.
I have been inspired by flowers – both in nature, in botany books and embroidered floral samplers. This has resulted in two completed works: “Floating Garden” and “Poppies” and a new installation titled “Ode to a Prairie” that will be installed at the Chazen Museum of Art in March 2022.
With the installation titled “Floating Garden”, I was thinking about an idealized space, an imaginary and dream-like environment. “Floating Garden” addresses the history of botanical themes in stock embroidery, taking flowers out of the context of embroidery ‘kits’ and moving these images into an installation to create an experiential environment. While researching the history of English embroidery I recognized the repeated references to certain flowers. Buttercups, English asters, daisies, and other flowers found within North America became the building blocks of this piece. It became important for me to create my own versions of these standards.
Through this installation, I have taken the flowers out of the samplers and botanical drawing books where I found them. I have embroidered them and reintegrated them into a simulated garden space, creating an environment filled with stitched lines.
“Poppies” began with one-hundred flowers, hanging and photographed to commemorate 100 years from the end of the First World War. From these humble beginnings, this work expanded to hundreds of embroidered poppies hung upside down from the ceiling, creating a dream-like environment. The poppies are a keepsake, a memory and a tender reminder of life, time and space.
The large installation that I'm currently working on for the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin uses Herbarium Specimens as its source material. On a trip to Madison in 2019, I visited the Wisconsin State Herbarium and drew for days from these pressed flowers. With this site-specific installation, I am reimagining the Museum’s three-story open court area as a field of floating flowers, blending fantasy and document, imagination and observation. The installation shifts the perspective of a traditional prairie, inviting viewers to walk underneath – rather than through – a floating field of flowers.
Based on the Wisconsin prairie, this work explores plants as markers of memory and place. Indigenous species were chosen that include goldenrod and milkweed. I am interested in the recent movement to restore Wisconsin’s prairie environment, almost completely destroyed by decades of farming. My installation both looks back to the past and toward an idealised future of what might be.
Amanda McCavour, Poppies, 2018 - Ongoing, Thread, Machine Embroidery, Dimensions Variable.
SY: How do you conceive of your larger installations? Do you begin with small, single embroideries, or do you envision the finished work first? What is your process?
AM: Play is an important part of my practice and I often work through testing in smaller sized pieces. You can see a selection of my staples in the piece “Sample Wall”. I create samples to test ideas, colours and techniques before creating a larger work. Arranged to look like wallpaper, this wall has work from early undergraduate experiments in 2005, to recent samples for large scale pieces. This piece is a record of my time in the studio where I improvise, follow my instinct and ask questions. I often create these smaller works or samples to brainstorm ideas for projects or to create examples for when I teach.
From this testing phase, I usually move on to a more planned or calculated approach. Many of my pieces are made by creating many units or expanding smaller pieces to a larger scale. I do like to draw out what the larger pieces may look like to test out composition and colour. For the most part, I start with a small test or sample, test it out in small sections and then grow the installation from there.
Amanda McCavour, Stand In For Home Title, 2009-2010. 8' h x 8' w x 4.5' d, Thread/ Machine Embroidery.
SY: What is your favourite work that you've created to date?
AM: I think the piece titled “Stand-In For Home” marks a big turning point in my practice so I’m going to say that’s my favourite work both for what it meant for me as an artist and personally. When I made this piece, I was completing my second year as an Artist In Residence at Harbourfront Centre’s Craft and Design Studios in Toronto. My work was accepted into an exhibition curated by Melanie Egan and Patrick McCaulay for the York Quay Gallery. The piece depicts chairs, tables and wallpaper on a 1 to 1 scale. Each object is created separately and then was hung from the ceiling in layers. This was the first time my work was made on a large scale, bigger than 20” by 20”, so it was a big leap for me. It was also the first time that I layered embroidered pieces and the first time that pieces hung from the ceiling, allowing for visitors to walk around the piece. Increasing the scale of my work in this piece marked a departure for me and set me on a different path in my work.
This installation is a ‘thread rendering’ based on a section of the kitchen in an earlier place I used to call home. I am interested in the vulnerability of thread in relation to the home, as both things feel temporary and fragile. Making this piece required me to re-visit, remember and re-create a space formerly my home.
The result of a layered investigation of the space, wallpaper, furniture, and spaces between results in a stand-in, a synthetic, re-created version of home.
The objects act as a trace, documented home furnishings, a visual record of a space that used to exist. Part shrine, part monument, part memorial, the thread drawings act as tribute to a room that once was. This piece emphasises the fragile nature of the memories, attached to objects and surfaces, in spaces we call “home.”
I am thinking about my home in a different way now with spending so much time inside in recent years and it’s interesting to me that this work I made 10 years ago still continues to speak to me but in different ways.
SY: Have you presented work with Collect art fair before? What are your expectations? Is there generally much difference between the reception of your work from Canadian versus British audiences?
AM: I very much look forward to making my debut this year at Collect art fair with Cynthia Corbett Gallery. I am hopeful that the British audience, who was so receptive to my “Poppies” installation during the Young Masters Art Prize in 2019 and Focus On The Female in 2021, will appreciate seeing the artwork in such a historic setting like Somerset House. I expect that “Poppies” will resonate so much with the UK and European audiences, as it both appeals to the love of botany and horticulture as well as the collective remembrance of war and loss. My intention for my artwork throughout North America and now in Britain is to marry the technical and traditional sewing and craft with the wider art historical narrative.
SY: Are there any artists who have been greatly influential to your practice?
AM: Anna Torma is a Canadian artist that creates intricate embroideries that are full of texture and character, often mixing different styles to create dense areas of stitch. Her work is playful and colourful and she references fantastical stories and garden spaces in her narrative stitched pieces.
SY: Your work might easily be categorised as something that draws more heavily on either art or craft. Do you distinguish between the two in your practice? What would you consider your practice to be more akin to?
AM: It seems to me that the possibilities for fibre are endless and that the role it might play is one of expanding and broadening the boundaries between art, craft, and design. I think my work sits at the intersection of these categories and I am taking part in contemporary art while utilising a craft material and process with a rich history. I’m interested in textiles for many reasons and to me, it seems to be a medium with endless potential. Here are a few characteristics that I find intriguing:
Transparency: I like thread's fine nature. Creating images and installations out of embroidered parts allows me to create ephemeral and transparent pieces that are both in a space but also seemingly on the verge of not being there. They are relatively light which allows them to move slightly with the air currents in the room which adds to the installation pieces.
Touch: I like how thread can remind you of touch. We feel fibres often, they are right next to our skin when we are wearing clothes. I like how when I use an embroidered image that this might be in the back of people's minds, that looking at an embroidered piece also becomes about this memory of touch, of touching something soft.
History: I like the history of use related to fibre, how, although my pieces are not functional, they still carry with them a reference to functional things, napkins, blankets, pillows, hankies, gloves. Some of these things relate to covering the body and comfort in the home. I find all of these associations to be very interesting.
Flexibility: For practical reasons, I like how I can roll and pack up pieces made from fibre. Most of my installations can pack down very small and are very lightweight. Almost like breathing in and out, these pieces can expand to fill whole rooms and then contract to fit in a small box for storage.
SY: How important is the use of colour in your practice?
Amanda McCavour, Neon Clouds Installation View,, Year: 2015, Ottawa School of Art Gallery, Thread, wire, foam/Machine Embroidery.
AM: I am very interested in colour and the atmospheric effects it can create. In a recent body of work, colourful, circular embroideries based on mathematical roulette curves found in the popular Spirograph toys were translated into embroidery. These patterns combined my interest in colour, drawing toys with radial patterns found in textile structures of crochet rings and tatting. This interest in mathematical patterning embedded into textile structures resulted in a series of works based on colour, line and embroidery.
The first work titled Neon Clouds is a dense collection of sewn lines suspended in the gallery ceiling arranged to look like floating clouds of colour. These neon hues also colour the space, creating a vivid atmosphere filled with saturated lines. The second work titled Pink Field, Blue Fog uses the same radial patterns to create an environment referencing a landscape. Neon pink and bright blue embroideries using roulette curves have now been shaped to create dimension. This piece is an installation and embroidery work based on an imagined and abstracted field of flowers and hovering clouds. The large installation is comprised of thousands of these pieces installed by single threads hanging from the gallery ceiling creating a field of flowers and a field of colour.
We look forward to seeing Amanda’s work at Collect 2022, and we hope to find her dazzling installations in more spaces around the UK in the coming years.
You can book tickets now to Collect 2022.
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