I am very interested in the relationship between individuality and collectivity; the single soul that merges with the universal one, the different points of view of everyone and the due respect for what is different from oneself. I try to conceive each of my works as a mirror in which everyone can see themselves, not what I have to say; I try to be a funnel that filters the energy that permeates me, that belongs to everyone and everything.
The three threads I use in the large works, colored, neutral and white, symbolize three possible different points of view of the same subject. The white, almost invisible since it is embroidered on a background of the same (non)color, also represents the vital energy that everything, living or apparently inanimate, emanates.
It is the most important thread for me, so much so that I use for it a different stitch that wrinkles and pulls the fabric, and it is the only one that, backlighting the embroidery, reveals a series of holes that allow light to pass; bright constellations that warn that “we are made of the same material as the stars”, as Carl Sagan said forty years ago.
In this spirit of energetic communion, I’m always curious to look at what other artists are doing; over time I’ve also often had ideas that I hadn’t told anyone about, and then seen them put into practice by others. This reinforces my conviction that artists are above all people who have a particular facility for grasping and expressing the movements that energy makes in a given moment; interpreters, and then disseminators. The expression of the universal soul that moves fluidly but compactly.
The king of the world was just the result of a lightning inspiration that came to me at the end of March, through the work of Javier Marin, a great sculptor that I discovered on Instagram and that made me a huge desire to run to Mexico or wherever his works are immense to admire and touch them up close.
I find this man’s works staggeringly beautiful: they give the impression of moving before your eyes. It must be beautiful to work on something that has countless points of view, compared to someone like me who moves in the world of the two-dimensional (or nearly so). In one of the first posts on Instagram I also tagged him, it seemed right to mention the source of inspiration; the next day he then wrote a post that really warmed my heart and encouraged me to go down the road I mentioned earlier.
I started drawing my first pencil at the end of March, on a really unusual fabric. It is an old shroud that I received as a gift thanks to the move of my husband’s parents; a very long and narrow fabric from which I obtained some precious scraps that I jealously guard.
It’s a work that derails from the tracks on which I usually enjoy running; I don’t know if it will remain the only face (I don’t think so, knowing me); the fact is that for now it is the only pseudo-human presence among my flowers, plants, trees, fish, birds and butterflies.
This embroidery accompanied me throughout April, with a few interruptions due to numerous changes I felt like making, and the fact that I ran out of threads and had to wait for them to arrive from England, with all the implications of Brexit. Even now it’s still waiting for the finishing touches because in the meantime I couldn’t stop myself from starting another work.
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