Women Entrepreneur Series: Aggie Armstrong the Artist

Aggie Armstrong is a multidisciplinary artist, working primarily with watercolours and acrylics. She merges pigment and fibre arts (embroidery) together.

Aggie is influenced by post impressionism and neo-expressionism which she revisits in her work through the traditional wet-on wet watercolour techniques with high flow acrylics. She looks to these past art movements and experiments with style mash-ups through colour and distorted subject matter. Aggie puts her own unique contemporary voice with her gestural swathes of paint, and intricate stitchery on her pieces. Her work’s intent is to explore how to bring the fibre arts from a predominantly feminine and domestically relegated skill to its rightful place as a respected fine art media.

The pieces are blanketed in meaning and symbolism, woven into a new story with a contemporary bend.

Throughout the works, she asked the following questions, and hope that you also consider these while you view her work:

Does needlepoint become less of a domestic craft when it is combined with paint and hung on white gallery walls? Did sewing on a physical canvas make it more elitist than if it were done simply on cloth and embroidery hoop? Is it fine art when a male artist incorporates it in his art practice? Where does fibre art belong? 

Aggie delivers her finished works as (an intersectional) feminist voice answering these questions in punchy, brightly coloured images collaging references to various states of female human consciousness.

Aggie was born in Manila, Philippines, and moved to London, Canada when she was 18 years old. She graduated from the Fine Arts Program at Fanshawe College and received her Bachelor of Arts degree with a minor in Art History at Western University (previously University of Western Ontario).

Aggie currently resides in Oxford County, about an hour and a half west of Toronto, with her husband and daughter. 

She works out of an old milk house she and her husband transformed into her art studio.

Visit her site: aggiearmstrong.com