Stitching Memory: Fabric Appliqué Workshop with Hangama Amiri

Join us for an afternoon exploring the themes, materials, and processes in the exhibition . through an artist-led tour and workshop!

From 1pm–2pm, artist Hangama Amiri and curator Elizabeth Diggon will lead a guided tour of the exhibition. Come hear how Amiri translates her personal history and diasporic experience into lushly detailed textile collages that focus on her parents, constituting the ongoing body of work presented in PARTING/فراق. These textiles, through their uniquely close relationship to home and the body, become perfumed with meaning and memory over time.

Following the exhibition tour, join Amiri for Stitching Memory: A Fabric Appliqué Workshop. The two-hour session invites participants to reflect and share their ideas of home, personal events, or special memories—of a place, a person, a dish, a scent, or an object. Together, we will transform the ideas into drawings and further into a textile piece of your own.

Participants are encouraged to bring an item related to their home: it can be an object, a photograph, a text, or a piece of memorabilia. To begin, participants will be provided with heavy papers to glue down their fabric patches from their items in whichever sizes and forms. The artist will then perform and instruct participants in fabric appliqué, a quilting technique in which they will use scissors to cut out shapes from fabrics and later patch them together by gluing them onto heavy paper. We will experiment with different collages in materials, colours, textures, surfaces, and compositions with fabrics.

Through layers of artistic transformation, the result will hopefully bring a new translation to the original item, a new idea to home and memory through the participants’ own creation.

Registration is required for the workshop. No registration is necessary for the exhibition tour. Materials will be provided.

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Image: Hangama Amiri, Woman Before a Mirror (detail), 2022. Muslin, cotton, polyester, dyed fabric, nylon tulle, velvet, chiffon, silk, suede, and found fabrics, 73′ x 53.5″. Courtesy of the artist and T293, Rome. Photo by Blaine Campbell.

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Host or Publisher Art Museum at the University of Toronto