Shortly after the last post I wrote, more than a year ago, I set out to design cocoons for each of the embroideries, and I made them out of salvaged boxes and various containers, lined with objects from various sources, organic and otherwise. In the end, they looked like something out of the closet in The Chronicles of Narnia rearranged by Tim Burton in a séance with Candy Jernigan, perhaps the artist who inspired me most of all.
Years ago, flipping through an old Print, I found myself reading a long article about her and her crazy urban archaeology work. I was mainly struck by her mixed media journals, notebooks on which she drew and pasted seemingly insignificant objects, but deeply evocative in many ways. I find this art form very apt to experiment, enthralling, moving and multifaceted.
Some of the embroideries I had set aside were unfinished and I got my hands back on them, sometimes unraveling them and starting over, often distorting them altogether. Then I created a page where I entered all the work I had done up to that point, making little videos for each one, and adding various photos to present them. It is not easy to render photographically the emotion one feels in front of one of these works: they are tactile, olfactory, subjectively experiential. Pictures, no matter how sharp or close-up, do not do them justice.
To date, I still have not been able to add the new works to the page I created and those who go to look at it rightly have no idea what they are doing *now*. I can only post the new things on instagram which is more immediate and quick and requires no explanation. However, now that another autumn has arrived, I felt the need to at least update the blog with news.
During 2022, I experimented a lot; I studied what other embroidery artists were doing, I started to follow the various exhibitions, and I bought a beautiful book that features more than eighty embroidery artists with their works. I embroidered a lot and after a while I gave myself permission not to always follow the same style.
Last spring I introduced into my work another kind of cotton threads besides the organic ones that come from Germany. They are very thin, and I go and buy them from a store in Rome that resells all the leftovers from the old haberdashers that are closing up store. They may not be organic but they are definitely vintage and quite eco-friendly since they are wound on cardboard spools!
I have had a few exchanges with a few curators focused on embroidery art, but so far without much result. One of them explained to me that I walk right on the border between art and craft, and while at first this valuable information puzzled me a bit, over time I recognized it as very much my own, and in line with who I have always been. Always on the edge between one thing and another, always undefinable, unclassifiable. A pain in some ways, but also something that makes me me.
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