Rhizome (Hot Gossip)

Centered around the adaptation of traditional country western embroidery designs, Rhizome (Hot Gossip) utilizes threads to illustrate the lateral spreading of knowledge, the interconnectivity of fibres.  

Featuring chain stitch embroidery, my designs include flowers and butterflies, plants and animals, along with symbols and subjects.

I’d just previously come from making performative costumes and stop-motion animation, and was just starting to be drawn towards fashion and embellishment. Fashion and costume both have a body involved, but fashion has this real, lived, worn feeling about it. I saw embroidery as having similar, painstaking gestures as animating. I gravitated towards a mythology, the Western, as a site where fashion and embellishment generate identity. 

The embroidermation for Rhizome (Hot Gossip) can be viewed on my videos and animations page, or on my website.

This piece was included in the Eye of Needle exhibition at Glenbow Museum, curated by Mary-Beth Laviolette and has since been collected by The Alberta Foundation for the Arts.