In The Embroidered Image photographs are used as canvases for stitch art, allowing the needle and thread to convey emotions, evoke atmosphere, or simply create masks over the original subjects.It creates a multilayered image that tells more than one story at once.
Sewing is another way to build up a surface and to build upon the content of my photographs. I love the meditative process of sewing – it is in such contrast to the technologically more immediate art of photography. I am also interested in how thread blended in and reacted to the photographs. The combination of sewing and photography brings together two very different processes. The use of embroidery is a reaction to the photographs and is a process that aids in the transformation of identity of the place being photographed.
Feeling a need to emote through these images, I began to embroider into the photographs. It was like therapy, a way to express what I couldn’t do verbally. When I start sewing, I don’t know how it’ll finish. I don’t sketch or plan, it’s a slow process.
The thread acts as a connection between the place that I have photographed and myself. The thread makes the photograph more personal to me and allows me to meditate on the image. Combining the two mediums (photography and sewing) allows me to reinvent the photograph; to visually react to a place.
