New Brunswick artist Anna Torma is the 2020 recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts – Saidye Bronfman Award

Pedagogical Charts 2 (2016), Hand embroidered collage on linen fabric, silk thread, 143 x 116cm, Courtesy Galerie Laroche / Joncas, Photo: Guy L’Heureux

The Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts – Saidye Bronfman Award recognizes exceptional artists who have shaped the field of craft in Canada; this year’s winner is New Brunswick artist Anna Torma.

Torma has established an intensely personal approach to the storytelling capacity of textile traditions through embroidery and appliqué. Her stitched narratives connect through technique, materials and imagery to Hungary – her country of birth and where she emigrated from in 1988. Torma learned needle crafts from her mother and grandmothers, and has a degree in Textile Art and Design from the Hungarian University of Applied Arts, Budapest (1979). She is a highly prolific and influential artist whose work is seen the world over in public museums and galleries, with increasingly strong commercial representation in galleries and at art fairs.

Torma’s work is unabashedly large in scale, an absolute requirement to hold the artist’s gestural sweeps of stitchery, appliqué, and brushed inks and washes. The crowds of images that fill many of her compositions are a balance of painstakingly meticulous details and her characteristically expressive stitches demonstrate her absolute control of her materials.

Irregularities in hand-sewn lines necessarily bring out the innate, natural qualities of fabric, celebrating the textile’s puckers and uneven edges: these qualities are equivalent to a ceramicist’s controlled yet idiosyncratic glaze, or a metal worker’s process of developing an erratic patina. Torma sources her materials from all over the world; linen, cotton, silk, sewing thread, floss and found materials are selected for their distinct physical qualities as well as cultural references – from pop culture to Hungarian red embroidered aprons and reclaimed thrift shop items. The seeming freedom in Torma’s textiles is the result of decades of practice, research, and discipline that allows her unmistakable control over her trademark visual/material language.

Anna Torma was nominated for the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts – Saidye Bronfman Award by Sarah Quinton, Curatorial Director, Textile Museum of Canada.

The upcoming issue of Studio magazine will contain a more in-depth look at Anna Torma’s work and accomplishments.

Party with Dionysos (2016), Hand embroidered collage on linen fabric, cotton thread, silk collage border, 185 x 150cm, Collection of Patrick Cady / Musée d’Art Contemporain Singulier, Photo: Guy L’Heureux

See the coverage of Anna Torma’s award by the Canada Council for the Arts.