Sanni Weckman
As a visual artist Weckman mixes traditional portrait imagery with unconventional techniques and materials. Weckman founds inspiration for the techniques from DIY-culture and traditional folk crafts. Materials can vary from textile to flowers or anything imaginable, everything can be used to paint an image. The material, the technique and the portrayed image all tell their own stories inside one art piece.
'I have never embroidered anything before this self portrait. I am a professional in portrayal but a novice in textile techniques. I use my lack of experience as a strenght, I paint with any material without preconception. I learn and break the rules as little or as much is needed to reveal something new.
Rebecca Levi
Leo is a portrait in thread of fellow queer embroidery artist Leo Chiachio. The portrait is part of Rebecca Levi’s "Flower Beard" series, which explores the collision of contemporary masculine gender expression with botanical motifs that have traditionally been coded as female and domestic. In this age of toxic masculinity, the images present a softer, more generative image of maleness, one that is creative, not destructive. Levi uses the traditionally normatively defined thread to break up gender attributions. By doing so, the technique becomes a political tool.
Alexandra Baumgartner
The base materials of Baumgartner’s works are found in anonymous photographs which she puts into a new context. She filters out a certain state of feeling and a new context in terms of content and/or form by processing the starting material through interventions such as sewing thread. The thread functions as a tool of extension and deconstruction that creates absurd, disturbing moments and moods. The starting material thereby not only gets a haptic level but also changes the meaning of the photographs and what they once shown. This way, Baumgartner appropriates the photographs and creates her own work.
Jessica Wohl
Jessica Wohls´ practice of investigating and scrutinizing people, objects and domestic environments reveals hidden metaphors and interpretations that we cannot, or choose not, to see. In these portraits, she exploits the uncanny while subverting domestic representations of perfection and happiness.
Conceptual strategies such as mutating and hiding induce a sense of discomfort. By employing tight boundaries, clean edges and sickly smiles, secret interiors are protected from the outside world.
Katika
Katika’s Kiss is the latest installment of the series of yarn paintings called Attachment. In this series, Katika creates crocheted images of people in love to catch moments of happiness of couples all around the world. The threads not only represent the connections between people, but it also makes them infinite in the form of warm, bright, and joyful art. In addition, Katika prefers yarn as a material because it is uncompromising in its color which cannot be blended and the threads themselves cannot be hidden. Consequently, embroidery art is an honest technique for the artist.
Anja Fussbach
The absurdity of human behavior in everyday life is hardly to surpass whereby the self-created contrast to perfect products of our guiding culture gives an idea of this living ambivalence: Anja Fußbach offers in her work an uncompromising and blunt expression of the dilemma between society’s codes and values in relation to our reality. Fragmented, dissected, perverted, coloured, and newlypIXU pIXU pIXU ,IXU ؓIXU IXU @ IXU le to laugh about themselves.
Text by Helene Bosecker
Jamie Martinez
Jamie Martinez triangulates the photos by using thread to deconstruct the image. As a result of this practice Martinez creates a new level of meaning of the photograph. The photo for „The Ladies“ was shot in 2012 and then threatened by the artist in 2017. He ran into the two ladies in Chelsea on a hot summer day with these cool outfits and loved their energy. Martinez captured this moment in the photo and then deconstructed as well as extended it with a red and white threat.
Ana Teresa Barboza
Ana Teresa Barboza is interested in the ability of human beings to produce things, to use what is found in the environment, and turn it into something else. What she likes about these procedures is the imperfection, the possibility to touch the material and the capacity that we have to surprise ourselves when we see a piece made by a laborious handwork. In her two works shown in the exhibition Barboza extends the photographs with her embroidery. By doing so she opens up a new level of perspective.
Sally Hewett
Sally Hewett is interested in how we see things and how we interpret what we see. She examines the perception and evaluation of things as beautiful, ugly, et cetera by building bodies in all of its various appearances. Hewett wants to unpick these terms of valuation and put the viewers’ notion of what is beautiful into question. At the same time Hewett disrupts their expectations of the traditional crafts of embroidery and stitch.
Jonny Star
Artist and curator Jonny Star lives and works in Berlin and New York. Star’s work blends a variety of materials and media such as bronze, photography, fabrics, and elements of installation art. Her ensembles explore biographical experiences, sexuality, gender roles, and identity and how it is perceived by society. Her work is shown internationally since 1996.
Annegret Soltau
The pictures KörperÖffnungen present a particularly intimate subject. They show parts of the female body between outside and inside, become manifest in body-islands. All of Anegret Soltau’s sewn photographs have a face and a reverse side. On the reverse side of her body collages the stitches are to be seen; they show the body quasi in an abstract form. Into the reverse side of the series KörperÖffnungen Soltau sewed small rags of text arbitrarily taken out of the Book of Ruth of the Bible as well as the Sura about Women of the Koran. The work KörperÖffnungen is exclusively based on the artist’s own body and the body of one of her friends. Like with a magnifying glass we scrutinize our ageing body. Annegret Soltaus consider this work also as an appeal concerning the fragility of the achievements of our generation.
Reija Meriläinen
Fat Lap is a soft sculpture and armchair made by artist Reija Meriläinen in 2011. It is a semi-anthropomorphous shape that brings to mind an oversized baby bouncer. Recently, the piece was incorporated as a seat for a video installation in a new series of works titled Faint that Meriläinen made for the Turku Biennial. Meriläinen has a background in sewing and crafts, but has also worked extensively with digital media. The Faint exhibition combined textile work and embroidery with video game worlds and Linkin Park.
Birgit Dieker
The central aspect of Birgit Diekers sculptural work is the metamorphosis of the body from an outer form to an inner state of being and vice versa. Dieker is interested in questions of identity composition, or the integral togetherness of body and personality, that we call our "I". The artist uses various materials to which many of her sculptures are made of worn clothing. The garments are cut open, dismantled into pieces, and then sewn layer by layer. Placed clothes contain the traces of its owners; it is filled with one or more identities, with lived experiences. Thus, it is the ideal material for the layers of the self.
Kathryn Shinko
Kathryn Shinko uses traditional fiber art techniques to confront uncomfortable social and psychological issues – particularly those involving sex and its connection to power. Provocative statements, lurid colors, disorienting patterns, and disturbing imagery are constructed using familiar materials: cloth, thread, paper, and yarn. Her goal is to examine – and either revise or reaffirm – our understanding of the complicated dynamic of male and female relationships, and the power-play that defines them.
Kathryn Shinko
Kathryn Shinko uses traditional fiber art techniques to confront uncomfortable social and psychological issues – particularly those involving sex and its connection to power. Provocative statements, lurid colors, disorienting patterns, and disturbing imagery are constructed using familiar materials: cloth, thread, paper, and yarn. Her goal is to examine – and either revise or reaffirm – our understanding of the complicated dynamic of male and female relationships, and the power-play that defines them.
Julia Neuenhausen
In the last 15 years Julia Neuenhausen travelled and worked in different countries, whit the aim to study what the nature of other places are, the patterns, the signs, the systems of what the artist see´s and what she experienced. InpIXU pIXU pIXU ,IXU ؓIXU IXU @ IXU , to collect invisible informations, signs, icons to explore a meta-level of the individual perception. Decoding, collecting and study the viewing and thinking as the technic of collage. Neuenhausen´s work is based on the exploration of semiotics of everyday life. This interest includes different systems as iconology, language, psychology, science and religion.
The Zaubertuch is in a installation composed out of the large embroidered wool fabric and 4 extra objects attached to it.The magic vest, the Brain Pillow, the magic apron and the rag of universe. It is a signs and symbol bow of what one will need, to be protected against cold and weakness. It shows the images of herbs, flowers, organs, mystic symbols and magic interactions of alchemy. When it is in „use“ it will empower the owner to implement the flow of life.
Shanell Papp
Shanell Papp lives and works in Lethbridge Alberta. Where she maintains a labour intensive studio practice. Papp holds a BFA from the University of Lethbridge, 2006 and and MFA from the University of Saskatchewan, 2010. Solo exhibitions at the CASA, Pith, The New Gallery, Gallery Gachet, University of Saskatchewan, Estevan, Latitude 53. selected group exhibitions at the SAAG, The University of Lethbridge, The Triannon, AKA, The Eskar, City of Craft, Textile Museum of Canada.
Victoria May
Victoria May creates thought-provoking objects and installations through the juxtaposition of disparate materials and processes. Surprising combinations such as fur and concrete, silk and rubber illustrate the tension between organic forces and human interventions to control them. These material investigations give a visceral sense of the dualities that permeate our lives, such as nature and institution, male and female, synthetic and organic. Materials and processes themselves become metaphors for resiliency or fragility.
Cordula Prieser
Cordula Prieser creates imaginary spaces. Their interlaced framework of wood or aluminium bands covered partially with coloured fabric, become buildings of a special kind, whose functions are not easily grasped. Their proximity to architecture is obvious: the constructions of airy modules open on several sides, build interior spaces that converge with the surroundings in an osmotic exchange.
Alexandra Knie
Alexandra Knie’s interest is to generate new contexts of textile visualization through her artistic investigation of the intersection of art, craft, and science. She focuses on scientific illustrations and methods to create a metaphorical image of embroidery that is put into multiple layers beyond an empirical logic. The popular viruses are machine embroiderd on fabric and show several details of electron microscopy images of viruses: Ebola, Zika, Poliovirus, and Lassa. All are known from multimedia and visualized metaphorically through the embroidery in a free artistic way in colour and design.
Karolin Reichardt
Karolin Reichardt practise focuses on an intuitive approach of traditional embroidery techniques. During her work process she likes to play with the precariousness of change and chance. With a specific interest in molecular structures "Microorganisms", an embroidery series using layered thread and beads on vintage handkerchiefs, comment on the romance and reality of scientific discovery.
Ruth Cuthland
Ruth Cuthand’s practice explores the frictions between cultures, the failures of representation, and the political uses of anger. Cuthand’s beaded portraits present enlarged microscopic views of some of the deadliest viruses and bacteria that have impacted, and often decimated, First Nations communities in both the distant past and the present day. The luminous beaded disks floating on black suede are both seductive and repellant, using materials and techniques that have long been denied status as ‘serious art’. Cuthland thus gives a traditional technique a new connotation that also enables a thematically interdisciplinary approach.
Shea Wilkinson
Wilkinson´s atlases show what remains after a glacier has carved its way through the landscape, leaving the ground both pockmarked and mountainous. The landscapes were inspired by the maps of Lewis and Clark, and she used hand-embroidery to emulate the distinct look of hand-drawn topographical markings. The artist is interested in utilizing the oldest mapping equipment around - our brains - to make these places come alive. When she´s working on these pieces, every group of stitches represents an elevation or depression, and she enjoys to daydreaming of the contours and deciding how steep the hills and valleys should be, and whether there will be subtle erosion or drastic alterations to the land. There is another reality that comes to being with each group of swooping stitches, the story of the landscape becoming clearer with every pass of the needle through the surface.
Laura Splan
Laura Splan's series of lace sculptures re-examines the doily as an innocuous domestic artifact that traditionally references motifs from nature. The design of each doily in her series is based on a different virus structure (HIV, SARS, Influenza, Herpes, Hepadna). Splan’s work explores the “domestication” of biomedical imagery in the quotidian landscape and materializes the ways in which heirloom artifacts can manifest cultural heredity of collective anxieties.
Katrina Majkut
Katrina Majkut is interested in how specific images can subvert the historical domesticity of cross-stitch samplers. Historically, cross-stitch often denoted ideas of womanhood, wifedom, and motherhood. However, excluded are the bodily functions, autonomy, and diverse lifestyles which are essential for any of those roles. Majkut’s artwork, “In Control”, attempts to directly challenge this concept by attempting to stitch all modern products related to women’s health, needs, and family planning with bipartisan and medically honest approaches. It also seeks to respond to contemporary issues surrounding reproductive rights and women’s bodies.
Barb Hunt
Barb Hunt lives in Newfoundland, Canada. The rich tradition of domestic textile practices inspired hepIXU pIXU pIXU ,IXU ؓIXU IXU @ IXU docile appearance of the apron and the power of telling one's truth. Embroidery can infer feminine obedience but the needle can also be wielded to prick the establishment. As a feminist artist, Hunt uses textile processes in solidarity with women of the past and present who devoted their labor to make the world a better place. Thus, Hunt politically loads the aprons and creates a different meaning of the object.
Robyn Love
Robyn Love’s two art pieces are part of a series of artworks that started immediately following the election of Donald Trump in the United States. For years prior, she had been exploring ideas around the word "yes" and suddenly no longer wanted to say yes. Love felt strongly that the word of the moment was “NO”. The artist painted a vintage textile with Sumi ink and embroidered on top of it, exploring how the work and expression could be simultaneously strong and delicate.
Robyn Love
Robyn Love’s two art pieces are part of a series of artworks that started immediately following the election of Donald Trump in the United States. For years prior, she had been exploring ideas around the word "yes" and suddenly no longer wanted to say yes. Love felt strongly that the word of the moment was “NO”. The artist painted a vintage textile with Sumi ink and embroidered on top of it, exploring how the work and expression could be simultaneously strong and delicate.
Gretta Louw
Stitches Were The First Pixels is the first piece in a new body of work from multi-disciplinary artist Gretta Louw under the title, FEMMETECH. The project combines traditional embroidery and textile art techniques with digital image manipulation and robotics to approach issues around digitalisation and the evolution of tech from a more inclusive and decelerationist perspective. One line of research interest within the project is the historically overlooked and minimised contribution of women in STEM; beyond this, also, the works in the series will examine the connections between textiles and digital technology. Stitches Were The First Pixels is a provocation about the fundamental conceptual and cultural impact of ‘craft’ technologies that have been coded feminine on the development of digital ‘tech’ - a definition of technology that has been accorded far more power, respect, and reward than all others.
Marianne Thoermer
Thoermer's installations are emotional microcosms amplified to preposterous and palpable proportions.They invite us to come close, to immerse ourselves, and to peak inside the genetics of sentiment. With long threads of wool bleeding out of the claustrophobic two-dimensional setting like thoughts or feelings.The confusing collision of cosiness and chaos.
Of softness and strength, of passive repetition and brusque, brutal beauty.
Niina Mantsinen
Niina Mantsinen combines graffiti and textile in her art in many ways - by embroidery, weaving and hand tufting. She transforms a form of visual expression known from the public sphere as a rebellious act into an ostensible bourgeois technique. Mantinen’s works represent the softness of textile methods and urban, fast graffiti culture at the same time. This way, she breaks the traditional connotation of embroidery and gives it a new, contemporary meaning.
Aubrey Longley-Cook
The typing awareness indicator is a feature that has added both anxiety and anticipation to the act of texting. The looping animation of the ellipsis is a hypnotic decoy for a real response. This feature allows for a digital liminal space and creates the illusion of synchronous communication. Aubrey Longley-Cook’s work is part of an on going series that investigates the narratives found by combining analog and digital forms of communication through the techniques of embroidery and animation.
Jochen Flinzer
Jochen Flinzer handles needle and thread in an unconventional way by creating images that can always be viewed from two sides. A pre-defined A-side is equivalent to an abstract B-side. In The Big Cup Final, Flinzer refers to the Scottish Cup Final in which the Celtic Glasgow and Dundee United teams contested. Celtic Glasgow won and became the cup winner. The names of the players in this match are embroidered in the clubs’ colours on a camping mat: green/white for Celtic Glasgow and orange/black for Dundee United. They are listed club-alternating in the order of formation. On the back, the threads are alternately guided horizontally and vertically: Green vertically, white horizontally, orange vertically, and black horizontally. This work is a game of codes. Just as the colours stand symbolically for the clubs and can be immediately assigned by every fan, the back is based on the structure of the tartans, or tartan patterns, which mark the different Scottish clans.
🔗 http://www.rehbein-galerie.de/Jochen-Flinzer-Works.21.html
Erika Diamond
The Emergency Tapestry Series by Erika Diamond re-interprets small illustrations of emergency instruction scenarios from first aid manuals and airline safety cards into life-size hand-woven tapestries. These images portray instructions on how to save each other’s lives, how to act rationally in the face of our mortality, and how to behave with our bodies. Diamond uses these symbols to question notions about physical interaction, danger, and control. Capturing a momentary yet epic narrative, these woven illustrations speak of our innate compulsion to survive as well as our compassion for others.
Kata Unger
Artist Statement:
Time-weave-hyperspace.
Thrust> Fire> Reverse> Black sheep! Survival of the fittest!
Synthetic culture cult here! Scratched screen? Display pixel?
Black-ink night journey! Ticker tape?
KeyGene-Defender! Access control not nessecary.
SmartBomb, falling star, ticker tape. WITHOUTSEX?
Body-spirit euphoria. Endless binary optimisation.
Jan Kuck
The illuminated carpet installation ARACHNE deals with the circumstances of the global textile production and its trade routes in an historic and contemporary context.
The basic idea of ARACHNE is that woman mostly suffer from harsh working conditions, while men, or nowadays international textile companies, are earning the fruits of the female labor. On the other hand, ARACHNE is a tribute to the strength of women, which is only representable by beauty. With ARACHNE Jan Kuck not only creates a storytelling artwork with an amazing grace, he also raises important questions about our society and the fact that our life makes only sense if it will be shared instead of haunting for unilateral profits.
🔗 http://www.jankuck.com
🔗 http://www.bernheimercontemporary.de/jan-kuck
Carol Milne
Carol Milne’s work is a metaphor for social structure. Individual strands are weak and brittle on their own, but deceptively strong when bound together. You can crack or break single threads without the whole structure falling apart. Just like our social fabric, the connections are what bring strength and integrity to the whole and what keeps it intact.
LoVid
Signal Gaze is part oft he series Video Taxidermy, which is a series of abstract sculptures bridging digital media and handmade craft. This body of work translates the virtual to the material, incorporating analog video source material, digital fabric printing, and stitching and sewing.
Alma Alloro
Alma Alloro’s work Black and White Noise is a part of a larger project that combines patchwork, quilts, and moving images. The work reflects on the subject of digital craft as new labor through the use of textile as a key material. First, each quilt is carefully crafted. It is later translated into a time-based format that echoes the initial work by mixing quilting and animation. By doing so, Alloro creates her own medium which uses embroidery as a base material.
Dinah Kübeck
Dinah Kübeck mainly uses textile materials and techniques as well as painting; sometimes these two areas coalesce, but not always. For quite some time Kübeck’s focus has been on the grid as life’s dominating force, on life’s structures and the human need for classification and repetition. Her work deals with social-constructivist principals and asks questions about the societal as well as the individually constructions humans build: constructed structures and grids in everyday life, that we are hardly/not able to perceive anymore, as they have penetrated too far into our thoughts and actions.
Natasza Niedziolka
For almost a decade, Niedziolka has used embroidery thread on stretched canvas as her primary material – the resulting artworks rest somewhere between drawing, painting and tapestry. While past series employed multi-colored, simplified still life imagery as an archetype, a mostly monochromatic hatching effect is the focus of her latest artworks that are grouped under the name Zero
Fiene Scharp
In the work No title the lines consist of hairs that are interwoven horizontally and vertically. Scharp interrupts the basic principle that connects with the grid, its uniformity and structure by taking advantage of the natural conditions of the hair, which expands differently according to the dryness and humidity of the surroundings.
"In this way, the square form becomes an organic drawing body that curves and sinks, creating a differentiated interplay of light and shadow. From the visual tension to which the grid is subjected, a positive potential for conflict arises. It shows the viewer that the structure of a grid must always be renegotiated.“ (Cat. Collection of the Stuttgart Art Museum. The Collection, edited by Ulrike Groos, Eva-Marina Froitzheim, Kerber Verlag, Bielefeld/Berlin 2015, p. 230.)
Anna Ray
Artist Statement:
Through making by hand I explore the visual and emotive potential of materials. I enjoy experimenting with different media, predominantly fibre based: silk, cotton, velvet, wool, and paper. Each have the potential to be transformed using domestic equipment and tools: a sewing machine, scissors, pliars, a needle. My work often blurs the boundaries between two and three dimensional forms of art; some pieces are painted or stained, like canvases in relief. My life and personal experiences influence my practice; emotions and memories creep in. I feed my active imagination with research, drawing on nature, ancient and historical art, design and craft. My desire is to create work that is sensually rich and captivating.
From 1994-1999 I studied BA (Hons) and MFA Tapestry at Edinburgh College of Art. I became a Lecturer in the department soon after graduation and taught for six years before relocating to London in 2006.
'In the Garden'
The garden is a traditional subject for embroidery. I wanted to explore this theme in my work and in August 2004 I was invited to be Artist in Residence at Winterbourne Botanic Garden. The initial inspiration for the project came from research of the historical textiles at the Victoria & Albert Museum and from my own collection of domestic embroideries.
Liz Collins
Collins often incorporates patterns from traffic and emergency signage into her work, referring to Op art while also waking up the eye, and giving the environment a visceral “stay alert” quality. Duality is at the core of my aesthetic (pain/pleasure, light/ dark, open/closed, and tension/release), and the work also explores liquid material, electric currents, interconnectivity, energy exchange, and explosive phenomena, both natural and human-made. Liz Collins work primarily with fabric, yarn, and other materials and techniques in the textile realm including jacquard knitting and weaving.
Marion Strunk
The main question in Marion Strunk's embroidered images is: What is a picture? She likes to put this subject up to discussion. Bringing photography and thread together makes it possible to show what a picture actually is: fiction. A thread is always concrete, so the photography will be concrete in origin, but within it there is fiction as well as in the thread.
"My idea was to use the photography as a medium of the past, with the thread as a medium for current moments. You can touch the thread on the photography. So you have a real moment of sensation when you are close to the picture, but soon – viewing it from a little distance – you will also see an image or a word in the thread."
Dave Cole
Dave Cole’s The Knitting Machine was comprised of two excavators, two customized telephone poles, and reels of acrylic felt that Cole knit into an AmericapIXU pIXU pIXU ,IXU ؓIXU IXU @ IXU ng Machine“ challenges familiar notions of labor and production as well as the supposed domestic work of knitting. At the same time the art work expresses a complex perspective of American identity.
Danielle Clough
Cloughs applies her embroidery work on a wide variety of everyday objects such as shoes and clothes, or in the environment, for example, on fences. The piece, Bird, was created for the United Nations as a part of the lead up to the first World Humanitarian summit in 2016. As boundaries and borders are very relevant today and shape the understanding of the world, depending on side of the fence, Clough is giving a new approach to it. By handcrafting directly on the fence, Clough make us look differently on an object that is suppose to divide places. The fence looses its cold appearance and it connects both sides.
Michelle Hamer
Michelle Hamer's work is based on her own photographs which she transforms into embroidery works. In her works, Hamer is concerned with being present in contemporary narratives and complexities. She is interested in the way that language and signage can define space and reflect on personal and global beliefs. Her works oscillate between fast and slow; past and present; personal and political and become markers of rarely captured but revealing moments of everyday fear, aspirations, and trauma. On the Road to Nowhere was as part of a two-and-a-half-year project whereby Hamer explored language around border zones.
Anna Talens
Anna Talens work Cinco jaulas are 5 object-books showing 5 types of birds caged among the embroidery threads, almost invisible, of silk. The work starts from the plates found in an antique shop with bird illustrations. A new book has been built for each of them. The spectator, attracted by the beauty of the illustrations, does not at first glance perceive that these birds are caged. It's about those situations where we build our own cages. About those absent moments of freedom.
Ana Teresa Barboza
Ana Teresa Barboza is interested in the ability of human beings to produce things, to use what is found in the environment, and turn it into something else. What she likes about these procedures is the imperfection, the possibility to touch the material, and the capacity that we have to surprise ourselves when we see a piece made by laborious handwork. In her two works shown in the exhibition, Barboza extends the photographs with her embroidery. By doing so she opens up a new level of perspectives on the photograph as well as embroidery.
Elisabeth Masé & Co
Artists Statement:
THE DRESS started with my paintings series entitled 'The Source' in 2015 (a large series paintings with women without faces). THE DRESS is a social art project to foster the economic and cultural status of refugee women after their arrival in a new country. The idea is an artistic collaboration with women from their new homeland. I consider it an equal rights project. The joint collaboration through embroidery on dresses out of canvas pieces to be jointly produced can start a real communication between the two groups and help to build bridges between them. It is often the refugee women, who well know how to do embroideries. In the past, they became the teachers of the German women as well as of some younger refugee women. The German women, however, give them, as much as they can, the feeling of being welcome, they help them to learn German and to understand German behavior as well as use practical advice (how to move through the city and, for instance, find an apartment).
At work, all women are wearing the same red dress, to level out their origin and status.
As language is a problem throughout (most refugee women don't speak good English nor any German), the embroideries show contents going strongly beyond flowers and decorative patterns. I inspired them to included messages, hopes, and even outcries. All women, refugees as well as the women from Germany, are sharing the ideas of the others during the work happening collaboratively throughout. Joy and understanding grow as soon as the red thread spreads out on the canvases and fill them more and more. In the end, I wanted each woman to wear one of the finished dresses to get a unique and signed photograph in the same posture as paintings figure to memorize an important moment in their lives. Many visitors came, men and women, to share the hours of production with the working women. Some of the visiting women were collaborating instantly. So the project gets a strong feedback from the communities where it happens.
I shot a short movie on the project, without documenting each woman individually by describing their background and story. I rather wanted each women to just tell their most important wish.
Aya Kakeda
Aya Kakeda created a series of embroidery artwork for an exhibition themed "Cute & Scary" at Flux Factory in New York. Kakeda created a cozy space which appeared to be an elder woman's living room with divers embroideries. However, it is apparently a place fitting for a grandmother. If you take a closer look at the embroidery work, a grim and disturbing story appears. The story is about an evil nanny, who kills three children one by one and takes over their home. In the end, the children come back to life to get revenge on her. The alleged loving appearance of the embroidery artworks contrasts the story told and thereby takes on another meaning.
Tanya Akhmetgalieva
The idea of a thread has a wide range of meanings. In archaic myths, the thread often plays a role of a universal connecting element and functions as a metaphor of life. Tanya Akhmetgalieva applies these different approaches in her work while creating her own approach to embroidery. She demonstrates that we are all connected to each other by numerous threads. We constitute a part of one great picture because we have a common, mysterious task. The thread, as well as embroidery, thereby materializes the immaterial and makes it visible.
🔗 http://tanya-akhmetgalieva.com
🔗 http://www.galerieforsblom.com
Noora Schroderus
Noora Schroderus has embroidered on American dollars hairstyles reminiscent of Disney princesses. She combines careful embroidery technique with banknotes and in this way highlights opposing elements of society, such as the masculine power of money and feminine passive beauty, industrial production and slow embroidery. Even with one's appearance, one may seek to communicate power, and using Disney tales and feminine beauty one may grow rich. Producing art is one of the last enclaves of Western society to be seen as having more than just monetary value.