“The things that interest me are so ordinary at times,” says artist Wendy Toogood of her series of 100 autobiographic textile collages at Stride Gallery. Autobiographies are often remarkable for their documentation of an uncommon life experience, but Toogood’s Nakusp Narratives are remarkable for their carefully embellished universality.

The well-loved Calgary artist relocated to the tiny village of Nakusp in the B.C. interior about two years ago, and started the project shortly afterwards. She’s the central figure in the middle of each image, with long, cartoony arms outstretched as she works to set up a new life in her adopted hometown. “The population of Nakusp is 1,500: it’s a village approximately half the size of Sunnyside. You can walk everywhere and get to know people just by doing [daily activities],” she says. These little windows into Toogood’s everyday life show her doing home renovations, preparing and eating meals, listening to daily newscasts on the CBC and taking phone calls and e-mails from faraway friends.

After a gracious introduction to her recent public lecture at Stride, the artist speaks with an infectious enthusiasm about how her day-to-day activities inform the creation of her artworks. The audience is in stitches over her sense of humour and playfulness. It’s easy to see why Toogood was a much-beloved instructor and mentor to so many students at the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) for more than 30 years before moving away.

The sketchbooks that informed the Nakusp Narratives reveal a commitment to and deep faith in the fundamental power of drawing. “I think of these as drawings, I just happen to like working with these materials,” she says of the canvas, various fabrics and ribbons in a myriad of colours, textures and shapes that she pieces together for each 13-by-20-centimetre panel. She describes the process of sewing in great detail, revelling in the techniques that she’s found to preserve the spirit of the original drawings. “I wanted it to maintain an energy that the drawings have,” she says. She tells tales of lunch and gardening in sequins and bright spurts of embroidery floss, stitches a jagged line around a sad story heard on the news and uses swatches of patterned fabric as clothing.

Each panel in the series is lined up in a single register, spaced close together on the wall, to encourage a reading like panels of a comic book or pages of a daily calendar. “I thought about doing 365 of these, and then I came to my senses, because they each take about eight to 10 hours to complete. One hundred [would] create a significant impression, so that became my goal,” she says. Even without a daily entry, the Nakusp Narratives fill Stride right up. “I chose not to show them here in a chronological order because I think of them as memories. If you think of what you might’ve done in the last year, you jump around, and you don’t necessarily remember in order.”

As the life of two artists goes, Toogood and her husband Don Mabie, also a well-loved Calgary artist who was involved with The New Gallery and taught at ACAD for many years, have it pretty good together. She points to one panel where “Don brings me coffee in bed every morning, with toast. Right at 7:30!” Then she jokingly adds, “and I want it to continue!” raising her voice in his direction. “I borrowed a cookbook from the library, and I really liked the korma recipe, so I put that in there so that I can remember all the ingredients. There are several references to winemaking and sometimes to drinking too much of it,” she says of a few panels centred on food and drink.

Toogood began volunteering at the village thrift store after her mother had a brief stay in the local hospital. Wanting to give back the community, the artist took an interest in the shop, because she donated proceeds to the hospital, and soon became the store’s official window dresser. The window displays and her textile collages imitate each other, as many panels show what she’s created for the local windows. She does a funny comic impression of residents double-taking at her windows. “It’s another release, and also when you’re in a new place and community, it is a way to meet other people,” she says. “The other day, the mayor of Nakusp said, ‘Wendy, I love your windows!’ So I’m sometimes very pleased with the things I come up with.” In the tiny town, there’s no doubt that Toogood’s wild, colourful esthetic will attract some interest. “She’s famous in the village now as the lady who does the windows. They are usually quite hilarious: a highlight of the village,” Mabie says.

Not all stories feature the idyllic settings you might imagine with interior B.C. as their backdrop. Toogood responds to tragedy in her work as well, with text scrawled across one panel in embroidery thread with the body count from war-torn Afghanistan or disturbing news heard on CBC radio reports. “You wake up to CBC news, and this is the first thing you hear and you just can’t imagine that,” she says of the panel that depicts her personal response to the recent murder of a bus passenger. The accidental death of a local child must have rocked her adopted community especially hard, as Toogood tells the story told though the words of a neighbour, who she visited that day. A snaky coil of embroidery thread winds around the words “I was teaching him how to knit,” to tell about this sad day. In the midst of an exhibition that so intimately connects crafting work with the observance of daily life, the inclusion of this detail in her panel on the death of the knitting boy is so heartbreaking.

“I do love the richness of surfaces that you get in textiles, how they are built up with embroidery, stitching and the appliqué,” she says. As such, the works are displayed in all their sensuality, without frames or glass to obscure the view. The task that remains for the viewer is to take in all these details, right down to the tiniest stitches that reveal truths about the daily lives we all have in common.