Mapping Via Plant Dyes

I am a Settler Canadian textile artist inspired by my family's immigration to Canada in the 1950s.  While honouring this moment of history, I engage with my Nordic heritage by bringing it to the present via ethical foraging, plant-dyeing and handweaving. While foraging in urban and rural environments, I use plants, trees, mushrooms, and flowers to create plant dyes. After dyeing fibres with these plant dyes, I stitch and weave works of art, imbuing a sense of place into my materials and fostering connections with the land and local communities via site-specific growing, foraging, and plant-dyeing workshops. 

My work and life are centered in a rural community that has a high percentage of Finnish immigrants. In this environment, surrounded by boreal forests and a rich cultural heritage, I’ve been inspired to incorporate traditional Finnish handweaving, Raanu, into my artistic practice. Raanu weaving (translating the landscape into woven bands of colour) was practiced extensively in Scandinavia during the mid-20th century, though it no longer is, skipping generations of practitioners.

I re-ignited my passion for foraged colour as an artist in residence in Iceland (2018) where I foraged locally specific plants to dye, felt, and stitch works that visually and conceptually related to the land on which they were created. Additional artist residencies in Finland, Toronto (2019), Iceland (2021) and Scotland (2024) allowed me to continue researching regional plant dyes and combine them in Raanu - style weavings. Since 2020 I've focused the research in Northern Ontario, foraging from spring through fall and documenting the gradation of seasonal colour from Kaministiquia to St. Joseph’s Island across the north shore of the Great Lakes.