Not long after my the last post over a year ago, I started designing cocoons for each embroidery piece, building them out of salvaged boxes and random containers, covered with objects of every kind, organic and not. In the end, they looked like something pulled straight from Narnia’s wardrobe, reorganized by Tim Burton during a séance with Candy Jernigan, the artist who, more than anyone else, has probably inspired me.
Years ago, while flipping through an old issue of Print, I came across a long article about her and her incredible work in urban archaeology. What struck me most were her mixed media journals—sketchbooks where she drew and glued down seemingly insignificant objects, yet somehow made them deeply evocative. To me, this form of art feels perfect for experimenting—compelling, emotional, and multidimensional.
Some of the embroideries I had set aside were unfinished, so I went back to them. Sometimes unpicking and restarting from scratch, often completely altering them. Then I created a page to gather everything I’d made up to that point, filming short clips for each piece and adding photos to present them. It’s hard to capture in an image the feeling of standing in front of these works: they’re tactile, scented, subjectively experiential. No matter how sharp or close-up the photos are, they just don’t do them justice.
To this day, I still haven’t managed to update that page with the newer works, so anyone who visits understandably has no idea what I’m working on right now. The only place I can keep up with sharing fresh work is instagram; it’s quicker, more direct, and doesn’t demand explanations. But now that another fall has arrived, I felt the need to update the blog with at least some of the latest projects.
Throughout 2022, I experimented a lot. I studied what other embroidery artists are doing, started following exhibitions, and even bought a beautiful book showcasing more than eighty embroidery artists and their works. I stitched constantly, and eventually gave myself permission not to always follow the same style.
Last spring, I introduced a different kind of cotton thread into my work, alongside the organic ones I source from Germany. These new ones are much thinner, and I buy them from a shop in Rome that sells leftover stock from old haberdasheries that have gone out of business. They may not be organic, but they’re decidedly vintage—and pretty eco-friendly too, since they come wrapped on cardboard spools!
I’ve had a few exchanges with curators focused on embroidery art, though so far without much outcome. One told me that my work sits right on the boundary between art and craft. At first, that insight left me a little unsettled, but over time I came to see it as true—and very much in line with who I’ve always been. Always on the edge of one thing and another, never easy to define or classify. A burden in some ways, but also something that makes me me.
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