AJA Louden: Prairie Star Deck

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AJA Louden, “Daughter,”  2024, yarn, cosmic dust, polyester, felt, 37" x 12" (photo by Blaine Campbell)

The walls of the Alberta Craft Council’s Discovery Gallery are portals into an alternate reality, covered in colourful tufted wall-hangings. In one piece, a pregnant woman in a turquoise and magenta space suit floats in a glitching frame, bow drawn, poised to shoot a flower instead of an arrow. In another, two women in space suits flank a greyscale skeleton. Across the room, a vibrant pink and purple dahlia is framed by the teeth of a circular gear. 

Prairie Star Deck — on view in Edmonton until July 20 — brings together a new body of rug tufting work by Edmonton artist AJA Louden. Best known as a muralist, Louden was invited to do a tufting residency at Fern’s School of Craft in Edmonton in 2022. He fell down the tufting rabbit hole and is still unfurling new threads. 

Although rug tufting and spray-painted murals seem unconnected, they have surprising commonalities. Louden uses two types of tufting guns in his work: the cut pile gun and the loop pile gun. The cut pile gun creates the effect of a shag rug, and the loop pile looks more like a Berber rug. With spray paint, Louden says that the “paint is particalized,” coming out in a dot matrix, like a Pointillist painting. The cut pile tufting gun creates a similar effect, with a spray of different coloured dots of yarn. Then the rug is carved at different heights, to create a layered relief. 

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AJA Louden, “Solarpunk Dahlia,” 2023, yarn, cosmic dust, polyester, felt, 28" (photo by Blaine Campbell)

Louden has built up a rich world of characters that recur in his murals and tufted work. In Daughter with Elm, Birch, Piney, a future-bound space explorer holds a pink flower in her hand. Facing her across the exhibition space, Mother with Okra, Saskatoon Berries, echoes her pose, with horizontal bands of greyscale static running through the piece, glitching at the edges. 

Louden looks to Afrofuturist writers such as Octavia Butler for inspiration, and this body of work is influenced by everything from tarot cards to solarpunk to Star Trek. Speculative fiction becomes a way of playing with history, the future and cyclical, looping time. 

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AJA Louden, “Shame,” 2024, yarn, cosmic dust, polyester, felt, 79.5" x 55" (photo by Blaine Campbell)

In Shame, a snowy landscape is depicted in shades of grey, with the figures from Mother and Daughter standing guard on either side of a kneeling skeleton, a chain around its neck. The chain is crocheted and pops out of the work. Close looking reveals details such as the carved snow pattern behind the figures, and the loop gun used on the skeleton’s back foot, which creates a sense of recession in space. 

These wall hangings are science fiction grounded in a prairie context, and many of the titles reference prairie plants and trees, including elms, birch and Saskatoon berries. Two round, floral pieces, Solarpunk Rose and Solarpunk Dahlia, add to the overall vibrancy and warmth of the exhibition space. 

Louden credits Fern Facette, fibre artist and owner of Fern’s School of Craft, with pushing open doors for craft in Alberta, and sharing her skills and resources with other artists. Without the residency with Fern, he may not have discovered the rich world of tufting. 

“Any piece of art is really a product of a community,” says Louden. ■

Prairie Star Deck is on view at the Alberta Craft Council’s Edmonton Discovery Gallery until July 20, 2024. 

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