One to Watch: Simone Elizabeth Saunders Lifts Fibre Art to New Heights

Simone Elizabeth Saunders has a preferred way for you to meet her work: chin up.

When her large-scale portraits go on the wall, she asks curators to hang them above eye level so “the viewer has to slightly look up in honour of the figures I frame as ancestors,” says Saunders. It’s a tiny adjustment that changes the relationship. You’re not drifting past. You’re looking up.

That posture cue is also a revolt against the origin story of her medium. Punch needle, Saunders notes, “was designed in the early 1920s for housewives in America to make little area rugs or seat cushions or pillowcases.” In other words, things meant to be stepped on. Saunders takes that underfoot craft and lifts it to gallery height, where it demands notice.

Her portraits feel staged in the best way. Before fibre, Saunders earned a BFA in performance at the University of Alberta and co-founded Ellipsis Tree Collective, an Afrocentric theatre company in Calgary. “The stage and script writing and directing and building character… influence the work that I create,” says Saunders. You can see it in the composition and the gaze. These aren’t passive muses. They’re leads.

Eventually, Saunders sought out a different kind of expression. “I really wanted the autonomy of exploring just my voice and my history and my Caribbean and my African diaspora,” she says. She enrolled at Alberta University of the Arts, graduated with a BFA in fibre with distinction in 2020, and found a medium that rewards obsession.

Fibre suits her brain. “I’m a very detail-oriented person,” she says. Textile is a medium that demands exactness. Yarn doesn’t blend like paint, so if she wants colours to sing together in a duality, she builds that loop by loop. “It’s really synchronizing the vibration of two colours together,” she explains.

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The material carries its own metaphor. “The yarn is so soft and malleable,” says Saunders. “If you snag it, [it] can unravel. Yet the content is rooted in… uplifting Black womanhood.” Make no mistake, the softness here isn’t fragility—it’s strategy. Her Four Queens series, for example, inspired by Alphonse Mucha’s Precious Stones, is re-centred with Black women and bold typography: black power, black love, black magic and black dreams. The words land fast, but the making of them doesn’t: Saunders’s oversized pieces can take anywhere from two to four months to create.

In 2021, Contemporary Calgary presented her solo exhibition u.n.i.t.y, which later travelled to the Textile Museum of Canada. Seeing it in person is the point. “Textiles… are so tactile,” says Saunders. Velvet threads catch light, sparkly yarn flashes like jewellery and colour seems to hum. Saunders knows a camera will flatten that.

Next up, Saunders is designing for the theatre and the home: she recently created a commemorative chair for Calgary’s Grand Theatre honouring Charles Daniels, a Black Canadian who in 1914 was asked to move from floor seats to the balcony during King Lear. Ahead of its February 3 unveiling, the project has “really inspired and struck a chord” says Saunders, including sparking new home-decor designs and early collaborations alongside her studio practice.

The timing feels uncanny as she enters her final trimester: she’s expecting her first child, a girl. “It’s as though the stars aligned… my work is so maternal and so much anchored in the feminine divine,” says Saunders. Ask what she hopes young Black and brown girls take from her work and Saunders keeps it blunt: “You are your own biggest advocate. Don’t wait for other people to boost you up,” she says.

It’s advice that matches the practice: take what was meant to live quietly in the background, pull it up onto the wall, and make people look up. 

Follow her at @simoneelizabethsaunders