Embroidery for Contemporary Expression is a collaborative project between four textile designers and four women embroiderers from the Middle East and South Asian diaspora, now living in Toronto. A series of haptic drawing workshops led to the design and creation of eight embroideries that express the diasporic experience and the challenges of maintaining and adapting one’s cultural heritage in the face of profound life changes.

The haptic drawing sessions (drawing by touch, or with the eyes closed) helped the embroiderers find new ways of drawing while working with objects, themes and symbols that were dear to them. Working collaboratively with designers, the embroiderers composed creative pieces that mix abstract and representational images from the drawing process. The resulting embroideries include traditional technical and cultural skills, using embroidery as a powerful medium of expression while inventing new and highly personal aesthetic languages.

The project showcases both a medium that is frequently seen as quaint – embroidery – and the creative talent and potential of these embroiderers who have often been systematically marginalized in the Greater Toronto Area. Instead, embroidery and drawing can emerge as a vector of new creative collaborations and can express shared contemporary cultural and life experiences.  

This project was generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

Embroiderers: Urfa Butt, Zohra Shakeel, Souher Toulaymat, Asmaa Toulimat.

Design assist: Munira Amin, Ana Galindo, Ganaele Langlois, Rachel MacHenry.