Laura Carwardine’s relationship with textiles began with making embroidery kits as a child. Now, as an industrial designer and textile artist, she makes and sells her own embroidery kits – but maybe not the type you would expect.  

Carwardine is the current AGO X RBC Artist-in-Residence. As a textile artist, her work uses embroidery techniques in modern ways and at a magnified scale. During her residency at the AGO, Carwardine has been exploring the intersections of embroidery and 3D printing, leading her to create Fieldwork (2025), a large-scale interactive textile installation. This installation will be featured in Walker Court as part of March Break programming from Saturday, March 8 to Sunday, March 16.  

Carwardine first realized she could embroider beyond fabric on hoops while at Alberta University of the Arts. Studying graphic design and fibre and tasked with creating an installation for class, she laid eyes on a large, perforated bench on campus and instantly knew what to do for her assignment.  

“Anything with holes or grids, you can embroider,” she explained. “There was this big, curved metal bench, and I embroidered it to look like an old sofa. There was a cat, pillows, and a draped throw blanket.”  

Laura Carwardine, Zip Tie Tapestry (2018).

Human-sized and magnified scales are now a staple in Carwardine’s textile practice. On the craft side, embroidery often focuses on creating small, intricate details - the more minuscule, the more impressive. However, Carwardine prefers to work at larger scales to showcase the exact knots and techniques holding her work together.  

“I think a part of it might be my eyesight and making it easier to see,” she joked. “But it’s mostly trying to celebrate those really, really small details and make them visible. When you’re looking at overall shapes, you don't realize what's happening in there. But you have to figure it out [technically] in order to make it, so you might as well show what’s going on.” 

Alongside embroidering unconventional subjects such as benches and more recently, plastic berry baskets, Carwardine also creates her own substrates. When her partner purchased a 3D printer last year, Carwardine didn’t initially see a use for it in her work beyond prototypes, but this changed after she made a connection between 3D printing and plastic needlepoint canvas.  

Laura Carwardine, Embroidered Banana (2024).

“I had used 3D printers before, but it was always as a prototyping tool, a way to test something that isn’t through a factory,” she recalled. “I was embroidering [needlepoint canvas] and I had this moment where I was like, ‘this is plastic… the 3D printer prints plastic.’ That was the moment when I realized I could model anything I wanted to embroider and put it through a 3D printer.” 

This revelation led Carwardine to a full-circle moment: making her own embroidery kits. Not quite the kits she grew up doing, Carwardine put a 3D spin on this classic hobby, creating bacon and fried egg kits that double as magnets. While she chose this breakfast duo for being silly and relatable, they are also interesting to her as a designer from a technical perspective. Using her 3D printer, she could design her kits in a way that transcends the boundaries of typical embroidery kits.  

Laura Carwardine, Fried Egg and Bacon Embroidery Kits (2024)

“People make 3D things out of traditional plastic canvas, but it's very planar - everything is faceted because you're cutting pieces of a grid and reattaching them,” she explained. “That material can't do domes and waves, which make up [the shapes of] a fried egg and a piece of bacon. To me, this is really interesting because [my kits] show really clearly from a material perspective that this is not traditional plastic canvas – it’s 3D, has a dome, and holds a wave without being held next to something.” 

As she inhabits design, textile art, and all the spaces between the two worlds, one thing Carwardine always considers is human intuition – whether that’s designing an inviting and interesting embroidery kit or thinking about the context and installation of her work.  

“A through line [across all my practices] is thinking about how people interact with the things around them – what’s an intuitive reaction to something? What’s the ideal user experience,” she said. “I’m always thinking of the other person in a way. It’s a very holistic approach of wanting to solve everything. If something is meant to be given to someone and used in their world, I’ll try to find ways to make that experience better.” 

Laura Carwardine, Great Friends Friendship Bracelet (2023).

In the last two months of her residency, Carwardine has been doing exactly that: thinking through the logistics and experience of creating an interactive installation at the AGO. Playing with scale, the base of the Fieldwork is an 8 x 16-foot yellow metal grid that will be filled with palm-sized 3D-printed squares. Perforated and designed by Carwardine to directly clip onto the grid, visitors will embroider these squares with yarn and fill the grid with pixelated colour. Carwardine chose a colour palette of green and yellow to resemble an aerial view of the Prairies, inspired by her many trips flying between Toronto and her hometown Calgary, Alberta. 

“I’m mostly driven by material, technique, and function,” Carwardine shared. “But I think it’s interesting to have a layer of genuine narrative as a way of sharing stories with other people and giving them an idea or jumping off point to start from for participating in the installation.” 

Laura Carwardine, Fieldwork, Textile Installation Supplies (2025).

Hoping to provide visitors with an analog break in our increasingly digitized world through embroidery, Carwardine also aims to pull the curtain back on the world of design. She even plans on bringing one of her 3D printers for demonstrations.  

“I didn't have many examples of people in the design world when I was young, so I’ll take any opportunity to share and provide visibility of the process,” she said. “It took me a long time to find the right type of design for me, and it's still an ongoing journey, but I think the more visibility and references people have into design, the more it will find the right people.” 

Laura Carwardine, Pink Basket Detail (2024).

Join Carwardine for an analog embroidery break or learn more about design by visiting her installation, which takes place in Walker Court from Saturday, March 8 to Sunday, March 16 as part of March Break programming at the AGO.  

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