Broken Parts

A sort of creative reset has happened to me over the last year and I got back to things I simply enjoyed doing without the pressure of shareable or monetary results. I remembered how much I enjoy drawing, painting and hand drawn animation. With time, I added embroidery to the list, weaving delicious figs, leaves, flowers and anything else that caught my eye. The latest lovechild of all my endeavours has become tapestry on canvas. For a few good days I walked around thinking I’ve invented tapestry, except, I called it “fabric painting” utterly surprised that no one came up with the idea before me. I envisioned shattered blue, going into green, surrounding a face falling apart into nature, and yet composed from it. As an homage to summer memories, which in a way define the child in me, I embroidered my left eye and my boyfriend's right eye and put them together. That’s what I do. I put things together. My day job in film and production, my self work, my deep dives into self help books and the things I make, all aimed at emphasising conflict, irony, paradox and how it all always, eventually, comes together to make its own sense.

At one point I got very interested in colour theory, even though at the time I just about passed learning basic shapes and shadows. I got a book by Jose Albers, “Interaction of Color”. It was filled with visually stimulating examples and processes with colour paper. Naturally I wanted to try each and every one of the exercises and while skipping “to the pictures” I saw a paper study of a work by Matisse, which was a portrait in ripped colour paper pieces. Even though it was flattened and lacked all detail, the face and form came together clearly through colour and rough edges. I tried that and it wasn’t great. For me, something was missing and I noticed that I’m just trying to make something like something. So trying this with fabrics and bringing some of my own personality and experience to it made perfect sense.

The online creative community has been a big inspiration to try new things for the sake of the process. When you see so many talented, lovely people who are happy to share tips, knowledge, techniques - you get on board with that. I know that everyone has a very unique set of skills, experiences, memories. Once you keep seeing creators talk about their process, you get more comfortable being yourself; you get to define what being yourself means. It’s a fluid form, sure, but there are themes, snaps, details. For me it is my identity, the union of Baltic themes, cold Soviet architecture, a warm summer in Italy, everything that has made me feel connected to the world around me.

I love the idea of using different fabrics, every colour and texture has a poetic name, a story, and delivers a mood I want to convey - Italian green velvet, red wine burgundy, azure blue. I want to keep growing it, adding elements of both abstract and almost unnecessary detail in embroidery. I love that, to me, it looks like a blurry yet very specific memory. This particular medium encourages “mistakes”, imperfections, layers, collages, and my indecisive mind rests here.

I am my own symbol of scraps and bits grown together into a fairly organic form. Mixed in race, culture, religion, I moved around looking for that perfect context to carefully place myself in. To no one’s surprise, I have not found it. While sipping through layers and layers of broken glass for years, only recently have I called it mosaic and stopped trying to smooth the edges. My new little hobby is just that, stepping away from what looks like nothing but broken parts to see wholeness in the bigger picture.