About
Varvara Zhemchuzhnikova
Varvara Zhemchuzhnikova is a textile artist, curator, and designer based in Vancouver, BC. Across more than fifteen years of international practice — in Russia, Finland, and Canada — she has worked through every stage of the textile and apparel lifecycle, from traditional and jacquard weaving to fabric development, pattern-making, and product design.
Her artwork transforms discarded and domestic materials — fashion-industry textile waste, vintage frames, donated yarns — into layered, hand- and machine-stitched paintings and tapestries. Two ongoing bodies of work anchor her practice: Painting Waste | Textile Stories (2017–), textile paintings made from upcycled fashion waste, and Social Ryijy (2013–), a project in textile storytelling and community building.
Since 2017 she has curated solo and group exhibitions on sustainability, textile waste, and the impact of war on people and the environment, and she runs community design, weaving, and storytelling workshops through her Vancouver studio. She is an Aalto University Alumni Ambassador for British Columbia.
She holds an MA in Fashion and Clothing Design from Aalto University (Helsinki) and studied clothing design at Kosygin Moscow State Textile University. Her professional background includes product design at Lululemon and sustainability-focused research at Aalto, and her work has been published in Bloomsbury’s Zero Waste Fashion Design (2016, 2023) and the Fashion Studies Journal.
Artist Statement
“Each thread carries a history, revealing how our lives overlap to form shared narratives.”
In a world where we so easily waste human lives in power games that disconnect and destroy — moving us closer to extinction — I feel responsible to both create and document a story for future generations. Each act, each yarn, each stitch becomes a step toward a kinder, more sustainable world.
I explore the interconnected stories of communities, traditions, and individuals — across political borders, genders, societal statuses, and backgrounds. I see the undervalued concepts of the modern world — domestic and female labour, like wasted material scraps — as essential to creating a new narrative for our shared future.
In my work, wasted, vintage, and domestic materials, stitched back together with love and care, highlight the connections between individuals, places, and moments in time. Each thread carries a history, revealing how our lives overlap to form shared narratives. Layers and randomness — life’s fragments and stages, individual and communal stories of pain and sorrow, love and care — can be explored close and far, creating a different picture of meaning depending on the viewer’s perspective.