Aiko Suzuki

Aiko Suzuki

Aiko Suzuki, fibre artist (b at Vancouver 1937; d there 31 Dec 2005). Although not a weaver or tapestry designer in the traditional sense, she was one of a number of Canadian artists who have used fibres and textile techniques as a medium for expressing abstract concepts. She began her artistic career as a painter, but her involvement with the Toronto Dance Theatre in the late 1960s as a free-form set designer opened unexpected possibilities for her creativity. She worked with strands of fibre to explore 3-dimensional spatial forms of dramatic, emotional impact. Her suspended fibre sculpture, Lyra, was installed in the Toronto Public Library in 1981. In 1985 she designed the set for the National Ballet's production of David Earle's Realm and in In 1994, founded the Gendai Gallery at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto, a non-profit public art venue dedicated to the encouragement of excellence in contemporary art and design. In 2005 Aiko Suzuki was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.