Amanda McCavour: Pink Field, Blue Fog

November 2, 2019 – January 5, 2020
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 2 at 1pm

Pink Field, Blue Fog uses ideas around the space of the garden, as well as silk flowers as its starting point. This piece is an installation/embroidery work based on an imagined and abstracted field of flowers and hovering cloud.  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. This piece transforms the interior space into neon environment that is unnatural and glowing, creating a faux surreal landscape.

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 2-d and 3-d 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- it’s subtle quality versus it’s 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 awards and scholarships from the Ontario Crafts Council, The Handweavers and Spinners Guild of America, The Ontario Crafts Council, The Ontario Society of Artists, The Surface Design Association and The Embroiderers Guild of America for her work.