Join artist Lan “Florence” Yee for the first of our 2025 Artist Workshop series. This workshop invites participants to explore their relationship to text and textile imagery together through hand embroidery. As seemingly mundane images and words flood our everyday lives (through signage, templates, media, and more), artists can parse out their deeply affective nature by taking away the veneer of neutrality. Text and textile imagery function as mutual interventions into each other’s spheres of influence.

Participants are asked to bring both text (eg. words, notes, lists, signs, conversations stuck in your head, etc.) and fabrics that may be significant or yet-to-be fully known to you (eg. a handkerchief, t-shirt, patterned cloth, etc.). This workshop will include creative text prompts to respond to your objects. We will combine the text and textile through two basic hand-embroidery techniques that Lan will demonstrate, the satin stitch and the brick stitch. Embroidery hoops, markers, needles, and various thread colours will be provided.

Lan “Florence” Yee is a visual artist and cultural worker based in Tkaronto/Toronto & Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. They collect text in underappreciated places and ferment it until it is too suspicious to ignore. Lan’s work has been exhibited at the Textile Museum of Canada (2023-24), Darling Foundry (2022), the Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art (2021), and the Gardiner Museum (2019), among others. They obtained a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from OCAD U as a Joseph- Armand Bombardier SSHRC scholar. They are a recipient of the William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists (2023). Lan is a member of JIA Foundation as curator of the Chinatown House MTL..

Lan’s artwork is represented by Zalucky Contemporary.