Alicia Appiah

[she/her]

BFA Visual Studies, 4th year

I am a fiber artist who works primarily with knitting, crochet, and sewing to create garments and sculptural forms. My work explores care, memory, and inheritance through handmade processes that emphasize slowness and intention. I’m particularly inspired by sustainable materials, repurposed textiles, and the traditions of craft passed down through generations. Drawing on influences from cottagecore, fairytale aesthetics, and historical clothing, I create work that blends practicality with imagination, transforming everyday materials into objects that carry emotional presence and a sense of quiet wonder.

Soft Death, 2025, Knit, 21" x 8" x 2.5"

This sculpture was hand-knitted using cream-colored acrylic yarn, then stained with red pigment to mimic the appearance of a freshly killed animal. The work’s soft, synthetic texture contrasts sharply with its violent subject, creating an unsettling duality between domestic craft and mortality. Suspended by twine, the figure hangs limp and silent, echoing both the tenderness of handmade care and the cold indifference of human progress. The piece draws direct inspiration from Jan Weenix’s 17th-century hunting still lifes, in which dead rabbits and game animals were rendered with opulent detail as trophies of human power. By translating this imagery into a hand-knitted form, the work reinterprets Weenix’s compositions through a contemporary ecological lens, transforming symbols of aristocratic leisure into emblems of environmental grief. Living in northeast Calgary, I am surrounded by rapid urban development that often leaves roadkill scattered along newly paved streets. This work mourns those casualties and questions the ethics of convenience-driven expansion. Using a humble, synthetic material to represent natural life, the sculpture challenges viewers to reflect on our detachment from the ecosystems we endanger, asking what it means to find beauty or indifference in the destruction of what came before us.