Anita Cazzola is a textile & installation artist from Guelph, ON.  She sees mending as a celebration of the life lived within a garment. Our bodies are in constant relationship with cloth, almost as if cloth is a second skin. While some may see holes as a loss or failure, Anita sees a new potential for expansion. Drawing new lines and adding depth & texture, mended holes are symbols of our resilience. 

Anita's goal is to disseminate repair skills and knowledge with a wide variety of communities to encourage sustainable textile maintenance, and increase awareness of textile lifecycles.  Since 2016, she has hosted several mending workshops across Canada, has taken on a variety of mending commissions, created an artist book on mending, written a research paper investigating the psychological, social, and environmental aspects of repair (Sustainability Through Repair, 2017), and has begun creating a series of mending zine publications.  She also leads a bi-weekly Mending Club out of her studio (formerly Toronto, now Guelph, ON), where she continues to build community around repair and care.  Mending Club creates space for reciprocal empowerment, stitch by stitch.   

Anita holds a BFA (with distinction) from OCAD University, where she studied Sculpture and Installation and minored in Material Arts and Design with a focus in Textiles.  Anita has begun to exhibit her works within Ontario in solo and group exhibitions including Abbozzo Gallery, Toronto, ON; 10C, Guelph, ON; and Propeller Gallery, Toronto, ON. She attended an artist residency at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Deer Isle, ME) in August 2019, and is currently creating a new body of work.