The Canadian Embroiders’ Guild celebrates needle arts by encouraging a Stitch-In-Public Day in September each year.  Join Mary Kroetsch to learn and explore how to stitch on paper or bring your own projects to work on.

Take inspiration from works on display in the Alchemy Embroidery – Collaboratively Altering Paper with Needle and Thread exhibition, created by workshop participants over the past several months.

About the artist:

Mary Kroetsch’s work involves deconstructing through fragmentation and reconstructing those fragments to shift time that was, to time that is, or could be.

She probes the mysterious images of people and things she wants to know about using multiple mediums with creative technologies – merging, layering, cutting and melding the parts of a perceived existence into a hybrid identity.  Many hypothetical elements are arranged in a collection that coheres into a conceptual depiction.

She is inspired by the relationship She has with vintage photography, which in all its forms is used to create and archive circumstances – documenting, tracing and memorializing them.  When she studies a photograph she tries to understand who and what is being preserved, chipping away to find a fragmented existence that is motionless and stagnant but has a history of being.  Abstract imagery shares imagined stories – raising multiple conversations about individuality.

Her artistic practice is research-creational integrating mixed methods of making to push and explore the problems arising from limitations and disconnects that happen when many layers impact surfaces, production, and fabrication.

 Mary obtained Certification in Textile Surface Design from the Haliburton School of the Arts, studied Visual Arts Foundations at Central Tech Art School, Toronto, and completed the Ontario Arts Council’s Artist-Educator Foundations Course.

She graduated with a Studio Arts Degree from the University of Guelph, Ontario in 2023.

Her work has recently been part of exhibitions at the Elora Centre for the Arts (Elora, Ontario) the Propeller Art Gallery, (Toronto, Ontario), the Boarding House Gallery, (Guelph, Ontario), and the 2020 Ateliers Kitchen Print Biennial, (Charmes, France).

Mary’s creations are part of private and public collections including St. Michael’s Hospital, (Toronto, Ontario), the Ilkley Museum, (Yorkshire, England) and the CAMAC Centre for Art and Technology, (Marnay, France).