Cyndy Chwelos joins Eden studios from Vancouver, in April 2026 as an artist in residence. She intends to develop the next iteration of the textile series, Everyday Things. Everyday Things, explores domesticity, thrift, and the handmade through drawing, mail art, and textile processes. Over the past year, Chwelos has been printing her drawings onto cotton tea towels, transforming these everyday objects into canvases for embroidery and collage. Onto these printed surfaces, she stitches and layers hand-stitched doilies and vintage tea towels sourced through thrifting — honoring the quiet beauty of domestic labor and the emotional resonance embedded in used textiles. Motivated by the work, she continues to explore how drawing, stitching, and found materials can intersect to tell personal and collective stories about the domestic everyday sphere.
Meet My Mom, an ongoing project, also informs this residency. For the past five years, Chwelos has been drawing and recording the daily life of her 95-year-old mother. She began translating these drawings onto cloth, experimenting with stitched line and stitched script of her mothers’ writing. This transition from paper to fabric has opened new possibilities for expression — merging drawing and textile traditions in a tender, evolving conversation about aging, through a daughter's lens.
BIO
Cyndy Chwelos was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, holds a BFA from the University of Saskatchewan, an MA in Art Education, University of British Columbia, and further developed her ceramic art practice at The Banff Centre. For over two decades, her studio practice focused on hand-built functional ceramics, where patterning, embellishment, and form pushed the vessel toward expressive and decorative territory.
After relocating to Vancouver, Chwelos expanded into community-engaged arts. She led collaborative projects with diverse groups to produce public ceramic tile installations, engaging citizens in shared making and cultural legacy. Parallel to her arts practice, Chwelos developed a robust career in arts education and programming. She co-authored the research manuscript Leading from Beside: Community-Engaged Arts in Recreation (2016), exploring intersections of community arts, recreation, and cultural development. She taught principles of community cultural development in the Recreation Studies program at Langara College, and worked as an arts programmer with the Vancouver Park Board.