During the lockdown, I started making freehand machine embroidery and tried to capture a vision for a post-pandemic future, along with a journey through my creative influences and history. When I started to make each work with this medium I initially made careful plans and laid out all the yarn in coordinated colour sections, but in the end I was led more by improvisation. The randomness of choices makes sense when seen from a few feet away. The process becomes quite satisfying after adding hundreds of meters of thread and suddenly, an impression appears.
The pieces are not always portraits of people or autobiographical, but they tend to represent the realities of the world we live in. They are usually composed of many different people, ideas, images, happenings, thoughts, historical references and imagined moments. Again, I used my own photo archive as well as found images and assembled them to create new narratives. Sometimes the work directly explains concepts and but it often leaves interpretation to the viewer.
Market scene: butcher’s boy, Free Hand Machine Embroidery, 2022
82×88 cm
