Surface All the Way Through by Arianna Richardson
As part of the 2025 STEPS Public Art Residency and in partnership with The New Gallery in Calgary, Alberta, STEPS presents the work of artist Arianna Richardson. Her exhibition, Surface All the Way Through, brings together three interconnected bodies of work: a series of handmade sculptures that often incorporate text; a playful collection of hanging “fascinators”; and two oversized soft sculptures that double as gallery seating, inviting visitors to rest and reflect.
Project at a glance
Location: The New Gallery, in Calgary, Alberta
Artists: Arianna Richardson
Documentarian: The New Gallery
Year: 2025
Services: Artist Capacity Building
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About Surface All the Way Through by Arianna Richardson
Every piece in the exhibition is crafted entirely from discarded plastic materials—such as packaging, potato chip bags, industrial scraps, and thrifted beads—transformed through hobby-craft techniques including sewing, quilting, weaving, and knitting. By reworking these everyday, mass-produced remnants into tactile and often whimsical forms, Richardson challenges viewers to reconsider their relationship to waste, consumption, and material culture.
In conjunction with the gallery exhibition, Richardson also created a temporary public artwork and led a series of community-engaged workshops, extending the conversation beyond gallery walls and inviting collective reflection on sustainability, creativity and care.
“I loved hosting the workshop at The New Gallery as part of my STEPS residency. I was very inspired by the objects people created and the ways they used materials, and it helped me to understand my own project in a new way.”
Artist Statement
I want to understand the many implications of the klepto-capitalist, hyper-consumptive society that we are embedded in. My practice revolves around the intersections between environmentalism, materiality, domestic labour, agency, consumerism, excessive decoration, and spectacle. My work most often exists as sculptures that mimic or modify everyday objects such as pillows, garbage cans, advertising signage, and absurdist consumer products. I often make my sculptures functional/ interactive and put them to use in my publicly-engaged installations and performances.
I use hobby-craft techniques such as knitting, embroidery, and sewing, introducing intensively laborious, hand-crafted production to vernacular objects that are typically mass-produced with great speed and efficiency. Aesthetically, my work pushes the boundaries of kitsch and maximalist over-decoration.
Everything I make is composed entirely of plastic: a material that I am endlessly attracted to for its shape-shifting mimicry and limitless supply of exciting surface qualities. As a toxic, uncontainable, and grossly over-produced material, it is also repulsive and surrounds me with dread and despair. It is the tension between these two opposites that drives my creative process as I work to both deflect and deal with my own conflicting attitudes in a time of vast uncertainty, inexpressible emotions, and constant horror.
Most of the plastic I use is the result of my own consumption habits: discarded packaging carefully cleaned and re-purposed or broken household gadgets that get disassembled and put to use in unexpected ways. The other place I gather materials from is the thrift store: an endless source of vibrant matter, abandoned craft supplies, and decorations. The material history contained in discarded things is something that I am constantly in wonderment of. To what extent can we perceive the time and energy spent extracting, refining, creating, packaging, shipping, selling, using, and discarding an object? Plastic-based materials have an epic life span: the materials necessary for its production existing as ancient life in distant epochs all the way through to the seemingly endless time it can exist beyond our human use for it.
About the Artist
Arianna Richardson
Arianna Richardson is a sculptor, performance artist, sewist, and mother from Lethbridge, AB in Treaty 7 territory. She is a lifelong crafter and thrift-store enthusiast, constantly collecting plastic-based trash and discarded craft materials. Richardson often performs under the pseudonym, The Hobbyist, employing hobby-craft techniques to work through an investigation of ubiquitous consumption, gendered labour, waste, excess, and spectacle. Richardson holds a BFA (2013) in Studio Arts from the University of Lethbridge and an MFA (2018) from NSCAD in Halifax, NS. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and has been featured in several performance art publications including the December 2018 issue of Performance Research, Emergency Index: An Annual Document of Performance Practice, Volumes 8 & 9, and the online publication of Watch Your Head.
Funders
The 2025 STEPS Public Art Residency is made possible by support from TD Bank Group through the TD Ready Commitment.
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