Sandra Sawatzky describes herself as a visual artist who explores big ideas with a very small needle and miles of thread.
For the past 16 years, she has created monumental hand-embroidered works of art "that speak to the hopes, fear and injustices of our time…"
Her latest work, The Age of Uncertainty features a dozen 1,200-square-inch panels that challenge viewers to view their complex world through the complexity of embroidery, where hundreds of thousands of stitches have been painstakingly combined to create art and message. It runs until March 8 at Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery.
The unique work crafted over four years and completed in 2022 examines the "uncomfortable truths and consequences of humankind's march to modernity through research extraction."
Sawatzky, who received Calgary's Outstanding Artist award in 2022, said her intention with her latest show was to convince viewers to "pay attention to the dark matters of life that affect all of us.
"I thought what can't be done with solemn lectures and mountains of data preached by sober prophets, might be possible with humour, and a fine needle and thread," she writes in her artist's statement.
Sawatzky said in an interview she hopes those who see her work draw the connections between nature and our society, which too often seems oblivious to its impact on the world.
When she researched nuclear power and its potential to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels she was shocked to discover how much money is being spent and ongoing being made to develop ever-more-powerful nuclear weapons to add to already full arsenals.
The panels were inspired by her love of medieval illuminated manuscripts where gorgeous calligraphy is surrounded by margins filled with flora, fauna and "funny little elements called drolleries."
Many medieval scribes combined imagination and impish senses of humour to create fanciful images to amuse their readers.
In that same spirit of fun, Sawatzky fills her panels with dozens of frogs, rats, cats, robots, water bottles and even a harpoon-armed dolphin, who may or may not be bent on revenge.
Sawatzky uses her drolleries to providing teasing takes on the human experience.
"I thought that was a fun thing to do and I tried to use images that are symbolic but relate to the theme of each panel. Also, the areas around the edge of each piece is supposed to be where the world of nature lives."
Many of the often amusing images in those borderlands are given a chance to "treat us in the same capricious way that we treat nature,"
Each panel is set up by a quote, from well-known literary luminaries such as Jane Austen to South Korean politician and former secretary-general of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon or industrial giants like Henry Ford.
In Sawatzky's wry take, Austen's quote: "Every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of volunteer spies" is catapulted from Regency drawing rooms to a modern street with a cellphone camera-armed "spy."
The panel speaks to society's seemingly never-ending paranoia that we're being watched – whether its Regency period fears that France's revolutionary fervour would infect Britain or today's world of government surveillance and online predators.
"That was just fascinating to me. I thought times haven't changed much. There's always surveillance of all types, whether it's mining our information or (tracking) where we go on the internet."
Humanity's seemingly insatiable desire for information about what our fellow humans are up to does not necessarily have to be negative "but it truly does affect what we're thinking I think."
Another panel includes Ki-moon's quote: "We are using resources as if we had two planets, not one." That message is driven home by embroidered renderings of oil sands mega machines.
Sawatzky grew up on the Prairies and has spent the last 40 years living in Alberta. After two decades working in film as writer, producer and director, she turned her talents to embroidery on an epic scale.
She describers her first major work, The Black Gold Tapestry, as a 70-metre long "film on cloth." It took nine years to research, design, illustrate and hand-embroider her rumination on the history of fossil fuels from the beginning of time to today while reflecting on climate change and the social impact of Alberta's primary natural resource.
That solo work was shown at Calgary's Glenbow Museum in 2017-18 and in 2023 it went to The Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas and this year to Boston's MassArt Art Museum. Next year, it will be at the Museum of Design in Atlanta, Georgia.
Sawatzky is currently working on a nine-panel installation called Back to the Garden, which she describes as an altarpiece to nature, highlighting its origins in stardust (carbon) that through the eons has evolved into life on this planet."
