While creating my embroidered jacket, I had an idea to combine painting with embroidery. I have always wanted to go back to painting again as it had been a long time since I had used this medium and I thought it would be interesting to combine two very traditional art mediums together. I was really inspired by the works of Michael Raedecker, and how he combines paint with embroidery. I wanted to take this idea and combine it with my own emotions and feelings about my past workplace.
For the first piece, I decided to try and paint a simple but realistic heart onto a small canvas. I would then stitch words over the heart as a visual representation of how these specific words affected me and how they were stitched across my own heart at the time. I felt that this would be an interesting development from my usual embroidery onto fabric and allowed me to do something slightly different.
I found it easier than I thought to embroider into the canvas material, however it was difficult to stitch at the right point and the holes that were made by mistake were more visible than they would be in fabric, so I had to come up with a method where I could avoid this in the next piece. Overall I liked how this piece came out, I think I might add a few more words to build it up, possibly even cover the painted image almost completely to illustrate how these words overwhelmed me inside. I would like this to be bigger in scale as well, but with the hand embroidery it might take a little too long but it's a possibility.
After this piece I decided to develop it even further by painting the canvas with the paint filled water to give a base colour and using thread which is the same colour, embroider words straight onto the canvas. I wanted to make it so that the text could just be seen over the canvas but it would be easily understood through touch. This could be seen as a further development of the idea of bad touch and forcing people to touch the piece to find out what it says, breaking the boundary between art and viewer. The words used in this piece would be the same as the words used in the last smaller piece, but repeated at certain points to illustrate how I would constantly repeat these words and feelings consistently inside.
Overall as experiments, these are quite successful, however as final pieces I think they do need further development, and possibly more develop in terms of relating it back to the workplace. I could possibly think about embroidering these words into work place materials but try to keep the thread the same colour as the physical piece? This could be something to look into in the future perhaps. Exploring the boundaries of embroidery and pushing it to the limits. I think these would also look good larger in scale, but this is something to consider carefully as it would take quite a long time to make these large scale.
I would like to do more of these, possibly using statistics on workplace gender inequality and create a series of these. I think the repetition of this medium would be really interesting, I thinkI might also experiment with smaller canvases as well, and just playing around with composition.