The Space You’re In - Episode 5
A conversation with Aggie
The Space Between: Inside Aggie Armstrong’s Creative World
For artist Aggie Armstrong, the studio is never simply a place to work. It is a state of mind.
A mixed-media artist whose practice moves between painting, embroidery and textiles, Armstrong works across two very different spaces: a home studio inside a historic farmhouse and a converted century-old milk house tucked into the surrounding property. One is connected to family life. The other offers something increasingly rare—a place with no distractions, no Wi-Fi and, for Armstrong, the freedom to disappear into the work.
From Paint to Thread
Her artistic practice began with painting. During COVID, however, Armstrong found herself searching for a new way to move through a creative block.
“Everybody during COVID was trying to do something with their hands,” she says. “I felt like there was a block that I was going through with painting, and so I tried everything.”
She tried knitting. It was too slow.
“I need instant gratification,” she admits.
Instead, she turned to needlework, eventually bringing hand-embroidered stitching onto her painted canvases. What began as small accents grew into something much more integral to the work, with embroidery becoming a defining feature of her compositions.
Then came fabric.
“I slowly added fabric to it,” Armstrong says. “It’s almost like quilting onto a canvas.”
Today, she cuts and reconstructs acrylic-painted canvases, sewing them together with vintage and designer fabrics. The resulting works sit somewhere between painting and textile—layered, tactile and unmistakably handmade.
Inspiration, Everywhere
Her inspiration is similarly expansive.
“Everywhere,” she says. Books. Pinterest. Nature. Flowers, in particular, inform her colour palette, even as she acknowledges the irony of being a self-described city girl living in the country.
“I have a love-hate relationship with the country because I feel so isolated here,” she says. “And yet I get a lot of inspiration everywhere.”
That contradiction seems to live inside the Milk House, too.
The Milk House
Once a working dairy building on the family farm, the structure immediately captured Armstrong’s imagination when she arrived at the property nearly two decades ago. She envisioned an artist haven—a studio, gallery and workshop space rolled into one.
During the pandemic, the vision became reality.
“When you’re stuck working at home and you just need another space for you to be creative,” she says, “we turned that into a studio.”
The Milk House is rustic, uninsulated and usable only during the warmer months. But its imperfections are part of its appeal. A vintage sink remains in place. Natural light floods the space. There is no Wi-Fi.
For Armstrong, that last detail may be the most important.
“I tend not to get any signal in there, and I work continuously,” she says. “No distractions whatsoever.”
The Milk House feels, she says, “almost like when I’m in an artist residency. All I think about is the art.”
The Freedom of Home
Her home studio is different. It is warmer and more practical, particularly for sewing and working with fabrics. But it is also woven into the rhythms of everyday life: the dog, her daughter returning from school, the constant pull of home.
In the Milk House, she can work from dawn until late into the evening. At home, she works around the clock of family life.
And yet, the home studio has its own particular freedom.
“The only good thing that I do love about the house,” Armstrong says, “is that I don’t have to wear pants.”
The joke is quintessentially Armstrong: irreverent, practical and a reminder that creative freedom can take many forms.
A Little Structure, A Lot of Experimentation
The contrast between Armstrong’s two studios extends to her creative process, which is itself a study in opposites. She plans carefully for exhibitions, creating a loose schedule—or what she jokingly calls a “syllabus”—to keep herself on track. But within that framework, experimentation takes over.
“There is a lot of trial and error,” she says.
Fabric may refuse to behave. A painted canvas may fail to match the vision in her head. A piece may need to be abandoned or reworked. Armstrong embraces that uncertainty while still giving herself enough structure to reach the finish line.
Her ability to balance intuition with organization, she believes, has come with experience.
“It’s also my creative business,” she says. “I have to do the organization and the creative flair or flourish of it all.”
The Next Chapter
That merging of the practical and the imaginative is reflected in the spaces she has created. Neither studio is static. Both have evolved as her work has evolved—and both remain open to what comes next.
Armstrong’s vision for the future is bigger still. She imagines transforming the entire barn into a year-round creative destination: fully insulated, equipped with hot and cold water, part studio, part gallery, part workshop space.
For now, though, she is content to work with what she has.
“Being a creative, being an artist, you don’t have to have a big space or even more than one space,” she says. “If push comes to shove, I really could just work in a corner with one table.”
Still, she acknowledges the gift of having these two distinct worlds in which to make.
“I do love that I have this privileged existence that I have two studios.”
One is a place to retreat. The other is a place to return to. Together, they mirror the artist herself: structured yet spontaneous, rooted yet restless, always looking for the next material, the next idea—and the next way to make a space feel like her own.