About
I live and work in Tkaronto (Toronto), the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat, and the treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit. These lands are covered by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement to peaceably share and care for the land.
Studio practice
I am an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator working across embroidery, animation, coding, and artificial intelligence. Throughout my practice, I work closely with archival and literary sources, with a growing interest in the visualization and interpretation of data and information. My current research examines what happens when artistic practice moves between embodied forms of making and computational systems, and how those encounters make otherwise invisible processes perceptible.
My recent project, creaturely, developed from a sustained collaboration with a large language model (LLM) and grew into a series of animated code poems, hand-embroidered works, and an interactive website introducing the computational processes that are part of AI systems. Conceptually, the project draws on theories of play in psychoanalysis and the phenomenology of film, critical AI research on the interface, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In response to passages from the creature’s earliest memories of consciousness, the machine composed poems in the form of Python scripts, which I transformed into actual Python animations, each accompanied by a hand-embroidered collar, moving the work between language, code, image, and material form.
I am furthering this research through the development of small transformer models, with a particular interest in the curation and representation of information. Whereas in creaturely I explored play as a method in the human-AI encounter, in the possibility that something unexpected might emerge, in this new work play becomes part of the structure of the artwork itself. The visualizations operate as small perceptual systems through which viewers can explore relationships between source data, algorithmic interpretation, sound, and image.
Cordyceps Septet draws on computer scientist Andrew Adamatzky’s recordings of fungal electrical activity from his research at the Unconventional Computing Lab at the University of the West of England in Bristol. Seven channels are expressed through sound and light, alongside a small open-source transformer trained on the same data. The electrical signals generate a sonic structure, so that the sound emerges from the data rather than illustrating it.
Cephalopod Songs draws on Peter Godfrey-Smith’s account of how cephalopods change colour. It renders a cross-section of sleeping cephalopod skin under a week of underwater light, recorded by Ocean Networks Canada at Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, and by the Australian Institute of Marine Science at Davies Reef on the Great Barrier Reef. Alongside each version, a small transformer trained on that light record echoes the skin in light and sound. Here, the cephalopod’s patterns of dreaming and the changing light shape the music within a lullaby-like chord structure, allowing the environmental record to unfold as a sensory experience.
In October 2026, I will be taking part in Unfolding Data Through Art, a winter school in Reykjavík on artistic and digital humanities research methods for working with AI, organized by the Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts with the Intelligent Instruments Lab (University of Iceland), Iceland University of the Arts, and the National Gallery of Iceland.
Biography
Alexandra Emberley is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, researcher, and educator based in Toronto.
Her solo exhibition for D: becoming a tree was presented at Gallery 505 in Calgary (2023–24). Recent group exhibitions include the RISD Textile Triennial (2024), New Contemporaries 2023 at Gelman Gallery, RISD Museum, Inherent Vice: Hidden Narratives at the RISD Museum (2022–23), and A Moment That Lasts Beyond Now at Sol Koffler Gallery (2022). Earlier exhibitions include Drawn at Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati (2014), the Biennale internationale d'estampe contemporaine de Trois-Rivières (2013), Cosmopolitan Animals at Senate House, London (2012), UpArt! at the Gladstone Hotel, Toronto (2011), and Testimony of Echo at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax (2010).
As Graduate Fellow in the Department of Costume and Textiles at the RISD Museum, Alexandra co-curated Sensing Fashion (2023) with Department Head and Curator Kate Irvin. Her study of surface design and the garment includes professional embroidery training at École Lesage in Paris and bespoke tailoring at the Tailoring Academy in Macclesfield, UK.
Her work has been supported by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Arts Nova Scotia, and the Halifax Regional Municipality. She has held residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Calgary Allied Arts Foundation at cSPACE, and Klosters Bentlage in Germany. Her graduate studies were supported by a RISD Graduate Fellowship, the Rosanne Somerson Scholarship, the Queen Elizabeth II Scholarship, and the AFA Graduate Award in Art and Design.
Alexandra holds an Honours BA in Cinema Studies and Philosophy, with a minor in Art History, from the University of Toronto; an MFA in Film and Video (1998) and a PhD in Language, Culture, and Teaching from York University (2013), an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Alberta (2014), and an MFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design (2023).
She has taught at the post-secondary level for more than twenty years across studio art, visual culture, art history, film studies, and curatorial studies. She held a permanent appointment as an Assistant Professor of Visual Culture at the Alberta University of the Arts, where she also served for three years as Chair of the School of Craft + Emerging Media and as Program Advisor for the institution’s first MFA. She currently teaches at OCAD University.
Contact
Background image: a scan of the horsehair lining from a petticoat deaccessioned by the RISD Museum (D37.066, 1850–1900). Process work from The Wolf and the Lamb/Petticoat Jacket, 2022