We were taught simple stitching to allow us to make our own embroidery pieces. We looked at other artists embroidery and were particularly taken by Ghada Amer’s ‘The Bugs and the Lover’s’ which at first glance was a beautiful piece depicting insects and flowers but after further research represent female sexuality. We used this embroidery as a blueprint to influence our own work.
With the help of yulia we learnt how to embroider. We connected this project with out theme of identity and community by using cut-outs from the display we went to see at the jersey museum. To link with the theme of feminism I embroidered halo’s onto the women’s heads and horns and a devils tail onto the man. I used thick red thread to symbolise femininity and brutality.
After I was done stitching I used photos I had taken while creating the piece and turned them into a gif by layering the photos on top of each other and creating a loop on photoshop. This basic form of animation made my piece look much more interesting an showed the progression of my work.
The next week Yulia came in to help us with the last piece of our embroidery work. In this session we worked to put all of our pieces together ready for display. We decided to sew it together like a tapestry and came up with a few ideas of how to present the layout. Some ideas included making it like a patchwork quilt, putting it in a line in order to tell a story or to just put the pieces together randomly to see what looked good. Ultimately we decided to do the latter and set to work arranging our pieces and then sewing them onto the tapestry, hopefully to be displayed in our NFT exhibition.
