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Cross stitching & Embroidery......

Once I had finished my previous textile pieces, and noticed how heavy handed they looked, I decided to explore the idea of embroidery. I had been looking at Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party and was inspired to look into this area of art. I went out and bought some embroidery kits with different designs and chose a floral design to match the imagery that I had been looking at throughout this project and changed it slightly to fit my within my own ideas. I planned to do one side flowers, and the other text inspired by the words that I had been working with within my prints and previous textile pieces. 

 I followed a design plan a closely as I could for the floral part, changing things that I didn't think would fit for the design I had in mind. It had been a while since I had done cross stitching, so I was impressed at how quickly it came back to me, and how I managed to get the flowers looking like flowers. I did make a few mistakes, and I did struggle getting the shape right a few times for each of the flowers. Eventually I got there, and fixed most of it by covering it with the fill colour. I'm still not 100% happy with the shape of the bottom leaves, but overall I'm happy with the finished piece. 

 For the text, I originally only wanted to use one word, but felt that with all the space that I had, and with easy it was stitching text onto this type of fabric, I decided to use more than one word. I picked out 5 different insults from the list that I had created for my prints, and stitched them in the same way using a back stitch, and stitched them in different sizes as I felt it would look less uniform and work better with the non-uniform flowers. The text looks as if its curving inwards like the flowers when in different sizes. I used a red coloured thread as I felt that not only does the colour stand out against the white and the compliment the pink tones of the flowers, the colour itself also has many connotations. For example, red connotes anger, wrath and violence, but also determination, action, strength and courage. From these meanings it can be taken that women do get angry when hearing others calling them these words, but it also gives them the strength and courage to fight back. I felt that this was very poetic and something that I might explore further.

 Overall, I think this is a successful piece. Although it is extremely time consuming, the overall effect is worth it. I also think that embroidery should be reconsidered as an art form. While researching Chicago's The Dinner Party, I learned that embroidery and ceramic painting are often looked down upon as art mediums because of their close links to the domestic space, therefore they are not seen as high art. I think that these notions should be dropped. The expectations of the domestic space is no longer relevant, and the traditional housewife is non-existent these days, and it is all down to choice - you choose to stay at home rather than be expected to. I definitely want to explore this type of textiles in the future, especially in the context of feminism and raising awareness of social issues.




Things to do next: 
*explore embroidery further?
*explore embroidery in fine art
*explore relationship of colour and image/text?



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