Immersive Stitch

Adrienne Tuer:

Adrienne is a first-year student at AUArts.  Her background is in Interior Design. This was her first foray into appliqué and embroidery. 

This piece explores the carefree nature of childhood glee.  A lightness that often fades under the accumulating weight of adulthood. It is an invitation to pause and reconnect with that feeling, even briefly, as an act of remembrance and reclamation.

Bella Braun:

A first year Glass major, I have fallen in love with the uniqueness and variety found in fibre arts throughout my time at AUArts and will continue to explore it’s potential going forward. “Just ask Chat” is a mixed media piece that attempts to comment on the prevalence of AI like Chat GPT in our society. Mirroring AI, it takes a classic form, Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss”, and distorts it, all the while bleeding fabrics referencing the gallons of water we lose when people refuse mental labour and “just ask chat”.

Christina Ryan:

Christina Ryan is a Canadian artist in her first year of studies in fibre and jewellery at AUArts. As a crafter and multimedia artist, she has been a visual artist and storyteller for over 20 years. Her deep curiosity in her craft of photojournalism has been transferable into the craft of making.

Along with life experience, she brings deep understanding and interpretation of the world with a human connection to it. The opportunity to learn new making and techniques is her lifelong passion and motivation as an artist, while creating pieces that stimulate and create conversation.

Ryan’s storytelling incorporates unconventional materials or themes as she looks for ways to share the invisible voices of the lost and unheard.

I am driven to look for new and unexpected connections within my craft and how it intersects with the storytelling voice I want to share. Using embroidery to emphasize what is considered as a women’s art form, Girlfriend Experience explores the marginalization of women who face social restrictions placed upon them by societal conditioning, as a form of oppression.

This piece looks at how femininity is performed in a patriarchal society, as part of the maintenance of a social order. The central figure confronts inequalities of power in stereotypes and narratives in sexuality, more specifically with sex workers.

On closer examination, the decorations of sexualized objects explore the iconoclastic opposed to objectification in the quasi-religious shrine.   The piece was designed as a shrine not to a Eurocentric submissive Mary, but to women reclaiming their autonomy.

Izzie Lutinca:

As first year fibre AUArts student, this art piece explores the feminist and punk ideologies using embroidery to communicate a message about the hard core punk scene. Misogyny is very present in the current punk hardcore scene, I want this piece to communicate that not only are girls welcome but without us, there would be no hard core scene. Up cycling this skirt was my way of showing the power girls have and communicates how important it is to call out misogyny to make it a safer space. Girls belong in punk. Girls belong in hard core.

Jenna Soltys:

Jenna Soltys is a multidisciplinary artist majoring in Fibre, specializing in fashion and fibre arts. You Break It, You Buy It reflects apologies manifesting in money and gifts rather than through words and change in actions. The pomegranate represents one's vulnerable heart, coins tumbling out of the organ as the only tangible remorse it has received. 

IG: @artforjen 

Jessica Waddell:

I am a transfer student from Capilano University with a background in film costuming, now majoring in Fibre at AUArts. Created in a 2D Fibre course, this work embraces experimentation through embroidery and self-made appliqué, marking my first use of stitch for imagery rather than repair or texture. The piece is a self-portrait exploring my experience of anxiety. Layered cheesecloth suggests containment, competing priorities, and mental overwhelm, while the monochrome palette conveys emotional numbness.

IG: @eboncloth

Madds Chennells:

I am design student with an interest in both illustration and textiles. I focus on how these two mediums can be used to tell stories, exploring themes of identity and connection through their language and history. As a queer artist, much of my work is made through the lens of queerness, and I enjoy finding ways to shed light on the existence of queerness throughout history, as I have done here.

Meagan Olson:

Meagan is a Calgary artist originally from Ontario.  She is in her first year of BFA studies at AUArts. 

I am a mixed media artist who uses material from my life to weave together the past with the present. In this piece I am responding to something that was said to me days after being diagnosed with cancer. This project allowed me to outwardly express the response I’ve been internalizing for 12 years. My classmates bravely added their “At Least” experiences to this piece. I invite you to do the same.

IG: @meaganolsonart 

Tayla Marie Van Beeten:

Taking inspiration from Nature and the destruction humans cause, artist Tayla Marie shows the slow but hopeful change of Nature finding ways of repairing and rebuilding. Tayla Marie used a combination of natural, hand dyed fabric, found materials, and local, hand dyed wool that creates this earthen artwork. 

Tayla Marie used found rust to dye cotton with metal from her family home to show the effect humans have on the environment. She burned the fabric to represent the overwhelming wild fires across the world. Tayla Marie used visible mending to explore the process of fixing the old and using what we already have; and she gathered sticks from around the SAIT campus to use as the frame, letting Nature hold and focus her artwork. 

Yezi Qiu:

Yezi Qiu is a Fibre Arts student at Alberta University of the Arts. Her practice centers on textiles, handcraft, and everyday materials to explore memory, care, and lived experience. Drawing from domestic life and personal history, she is interested in how soft materials carry time, emotion, and quiet narratives. Through making, Yezi reflects on growth, femininity, and the intimate relationship between the body, labor, and material.

Winnie Five:

Winnie Five is a Hong Kong–born Canadian artist whose practice centers on human connection and shared experience. Through diverse media, she explores how art can foster dialogue, empathy, and resilience within communities.

Her work seeks to create spaces where people can connect, reflect, and support one another, conveying messages of care, encouragement, and collective strength. By engaging viewers both emotionally and intellectually, Winnie’s art emphasizes the enduring power of connection in nurturing understanding and hope.

Created in response to a devastating fire in Tai Po, Hong Kong, this work emerged from a period of quiet reckoning after profound loss. Through the figure of the lion, the artist reflects on a belief that true courage is not the absence of pain, but the willingness to rise while carrying wounds.

The lion serves as a metaphor for resilience shaped by lived experience rather than dominance. Marked by injury yet still standing, it embodies courage as endurance rather than conquest. The crown, added as a final gesture, marks a quiet triumph—an affirmation of survival claimed with dignity.

Executed through embroidery and painting, each stitch and brushstroke is built slowly, one at a time. This labour-intensive process mirrors the human experience of recovery, courage and wisdom are not regained all at once, but accumulated gradually through patience, endurance, and care. Rooted in a specific tragedy yet reaching beyond it, the work offers art as a connective space, reminding us that even after devastation, humanity endures, and we do not stand alone.