This Calgary artist found a global audience with the 'soft power' of her textile portraits of Black women

''I was always searching for a sense of belonging and identity within the canon of art history, you know, as a biracial Black woman — not really identifying with all these eras we were studying. And so portraiture was always something that I did throughout school — creating narratives of Black womanhood.

When I started creating portraiture with the tufting gun and punch needle, I had no idea it would catch on the way it did. It's something that is highly unique, I think, and it's such a tactile medium. Like, people see it from afar and it looks like a painting, but then you get up close and you can see the fibres and the textures and the metallic threads and the velvet threads.''