Embroidery Eraser

Embroidery made the mainstream media this week. Yep, right there in the Guardian’s Culture Section under the rubric Photography.  This is not a typo.  Have a look.

“Julie Cockburn takes studio portraits from the past, obliterates the faces with embroidery – and injects them with new life,” writes Sean O’Hogan, the Guardian’s photography columnist.  I’m not so sure about the injecting new life into them part. Recycling, re-purposing, maybe.  Getting attention, for sure.   I suspect this is the point of Ms Cockburn’s use of photographs, never mind the art speak of her gallery.

The combination of thread and photographs (or paint, for that matter) is not novel.  I’ve written about it before.  Sadly, pairing thread with some other media continues to be the best way to persuade the mainstream art establishment to recognize embroidery as a valid artistic technique. 

And that is a pity because Julie Cockburn is a very imaginative embroiderer.  The shapes that she creates, her controlled, beautiful stitching, and the effect of her color choices are arresting in and of themselves. Had she ditched the photographs and stitched onto plain canvas many of her works would stand on their own. 

But would they attract attention? Would they sell? The goal of artists, let’s be pragmatic, is to make a buck so they can buy materials, have a roof over their head and eat, too.

Still, if we turn the photography proposition on its head, perhaps Julie might be saying something else. Yes, I can do art speak too.  Maybe she is telling the art world to look at what embroidery can do. It can obliterate/erase associations with a cozy past (represented by vintage photos) and you, dear viewer, just have to give up your prejudices and look at what abstracts modern embroidery can produce. 

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder and understanding in the mind of the onlooker, but reputation is firmly in the hands of the art establishment.  So hats off to Julie The Embroiderer, for grabbing their attention and making it into the London and New York art scenes. Not an easy task. Judging from her long list of exhibitions and the considerable size of her oeuvre, she has worked long and hard at it. The patience and perseverance that embroidery teaches is showing. My hope is that just maybe, further along in her career, she will get her embroidery into galleries not through the back door and not on crutches.

Never say Never

Technology moves at break-neck speed, or so it seems to me. As recently as May 2014, I smugly predicted that hand-embroidery was “safe” from the tentacles of technology such as 3-D printing, which enables painters/artists to replicate both the image and structure of their work.  Well as far as I can tell, embroidery is still unscathed, but there are developments.

Ingrida Kazėnaitė, a design student at from Kaunas, Lithuania, is creating a pen-like tool, which is intended to replace needle and thread in the repair of rips and tears. Her device also offers artistic possibilities, she believes. The wand would hold nano fibers in a solution and a scanner. Pass the tip over the rip to identify polyester or cotton fabric for color and structure, and then “ print” a patch from nano fibers to rejoin the edges of a tear. Her device is still “a work in progress”, but it is a finalist in the Electrolux design competition, which means the personal electronics industry sees merit in the idea.  

Miss Kazėnaitė’s  pen is based on a technology developed by Fabrican, a firm that generates garments by spraying particles of natural materials onto forms or people. Sewing and weaving techniques are nowhere to be seen. It’s quite mind boggling and certainly offers scope for artists and businessman. Have a look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE_Q7aafKnM

I can imagine that, in time, spray-on fabric could revolutionize the fashion industry --yet again. The number of thread and cloth manufactures would shrink. Robots, working round the clock, could replace sewing machine operators in sweat-shops, much as computer-controlled machines replaced mechanics in automobile factories. Will this new clothing be warm/cool, easy to clean, and recycle?  The fashion world and its technologist will undoubtedly work hard to convince us. They may even succeed, for some categories of clothing.

As for the future of the repair-fabric-pen, well I am less persuaded. I can foresee its utility once clothing is not woven, but sprayed.  But until then?  Electric shavers and depilatory devices have not replaced razor blades, although they have spurred manufactures to improve them. Stick-on bandages, now in plastic as well as cloth, sit on pharmacy shelves along with spray on band-aids.  And we all have gadgets that were once “oh so wonderfully exciting” now languishing in drawers and closets. Sure power mixers beat hand-whisks. And floor robots are better than vacuum cleaners, which are better than carpet beaters. But can you really improve a hand-needle, besides motorizing it?

I am not convinced that you need a machine for simple repairs, even if you are hopeless with needle and thread.  I have to hold up my hand to not always attacking minor disasters with needle and thread. In the past, when life was more hectic than it is today, I was known to repaired rips or drooping hems with scotch tape. Sometime I even stapled seams. Runs aka ladders in stocking got temporarily halted by drops of nail varnish.  Iron-on (irons..anyone remember that  ancient technology? ) patches camouflaged holes in jeans. Come to think of it, some new jeans come with holes and rips. It’s not even a problem anymore. That’s the ultimate solution.

Miss Kazėnaitė’s device will likely appeal to the techno-trendy, fashion-conscious generation, who has never worn items of clothing long enough for them to need repair. To be sure her device is an attractive, clever miniaturization of the bulky industrial sprayer in the video.  But I can't help feeling it is a solution looking for a problem. Am I a Luddite? Perhaps, but that’s how I see it through the eye of my needle.

Say It with Thread

To my amazement, embroidery is finding a role beyond fashion, beyond craft, beyond museums. Companies and organizations, with no affinity to needlework at all, are choosing embroidery as a medium to communicate. Yes, they are sending us subliminal messages through embroidery. And before you ask, I haven’t been drinking.

A  Swatch

Out Christmas shopping, I passed a display at Swatch, that plastic digital watch loved by trendy teens. The shop’s window was decked with snowmen, cross-stitched in white on a red back ground. They created a backdrop for the display cases, filled with funky timepieces. Sure, the figures in XXX’s had been computer-generated to simulate embroidery. I was not being fooled.  

Yet for me the question was why simulate embroidery? Heaven knows chocolate-box pictures of Swiss alpine villages might have worked too.  What qualities was this techie company trying to get across that it could best by suggesting embroidery? Tradition? Embroidery does have a long tradition, longer than Swiss watches.  Craftsmanship? Do they want us to overlook the synthetic materials and industrial process need to mass produce plastic watches?  Embroidery does conjure up “the handwork quality” to non-stitchers. Well, that is what I read into what I was seeing. But then I’ve got embroidery on the brain. Overall, the hidden messages, reaching me for one, were positive.

This was not so with another image I stumbled upon in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), when I was researching how widely contemporary English uses stitching terms. I consulted HBR on a lark. 

Now, HBR is not a periodical one finds in the arts and crafts section of a news-stand. It is a very serious journal, widely read by the captains of industry and those waiting to join the ranks. So if any organization is mindful of Marshall McLuen’s adage “the medium is the message”, it’s this lot.

Just click here to see the image I mean.

To my astonishment, the HBR website displayed a piece of needle work. I kid you not.  The editor chose to promote an article entitled HBR“The Big Lie of Strategic Planning” by Roger L. Martin with a pseudo-sampler beautifully stitched by Nicole de Vries. A message overlaying the embroidery reads “A detailed plan may be comforting, but it's not a strategy.”  

The HBR embroidery is a spoof on a traditional sampler style and a take off on “Home Sweet Home.” The hearts and stylized flowers are meant to telegraph conventional wisdom of yesteryear.  Strategy is not enough in contemporary business.The HBR may be right about business.  Maybe detail, care, plan, and comfort do not cut it if you want to get ahead in corporate life. However, as an embroiderer, I found their illustration with its overlay most unfortunate.

The negatives in the message I picked up on were:  needlework, just like strategy, is old-fashioned, useless, and outmoded. The graphic’s qualities may reinforce the article, but, in the process they belittle needlework, and samplers in particular, which require considerable attention to detail, persistence, and careful planning. 

How unfortunate for a male-dominated business school  to pick  a quintessentially female form of art and expression to emphasize negative qualities. The Harvard crowd maybe at the fore of business thoughts, but, when it comes to needlework they sure are stuck in stereotypical thinking, which is precisely what they abhor. How ironic.

Thank goodness for more hip publications like Wired and the  New York Times. Both have cottoned onto the work of thread-graphic designer Evelin Kasikov.  

She revamps traditional cross-stitch and other straight stitching techniques to introduce to a wider public the possibilities of needlework in a digital age. 

Typography by Evelin Kasikov published in Wired Magazine

Despite using a traditional medium, let’s face it thread is an old medium, the subliminal message of the Kasikov’s work is that embroidery, done her way, is in step with the computer generation.   Evelin builds on the positives of  traditional needlework – care and precision - and smashes through the widely- held negative preconceptions sticking to needlecraft such as repetitive and unoriginal.  

And it sure doesn’t hurt her embroidery’s allure that it appears next to a name brand Swiss watch.

I cheer on Evelin’s success. She is making inroads in the world of advertising as well.  Have a look at the logo she created for the women’s line of Nike sportswear which should go on sale in January 2014. How wonderful that hand stitching is aligned with young women, vigorous, active, and “with it.” . But you can see more on her site.

Nike logo produced by Evelin  Kasikova for line of women's wear

Sure the Nike design, like the snowman in the Swatch display, will be produced mechanically. Never the less the logo is likely to retain that worked-by-hand quality. 

Although Evelin came to hand stitching less than a decade ago, she is doing a fabulous things to modernize the image -- graphic and PR - of stitching. In her work, the medium is the message, too. For once, both are modern and positive. Needlework can appeal to the young, as Evelin is showing us. Embroidery can survive in the digital age.