The Stitch Safari Podcast

This is the first time in 110 years that an artwork that includes embroidery and collage has won the prestigious Archibald Prize.  This episode looks behind comments and critics to find a precedent from 1950s America.

It's a tortuous history, the invention of the sewing machine, but surely one of the most important and useful machines ever devised.

After weeks of speculation, we were able to witness the Coronation of King Charles III - and what a celebration of British designers and British craftsmanship, past and present who created spectacular embroidery full of rich symbolism fit for a new King and Queen.

Join me as I discuss five contemporary embroidery artists who make use of both simple and intricate embroidery techniques, using hand and machine embroidery, to create amazingly innovative and diverse stitchery.

A short recap of the history of Canvaswork for context, moving onto the complexity of contemporary Canvaswork, featuring the design work of two highly regarded artists, Kaffe Fassett and Raymond Honeyman.

 ‘Queering the Subversive Stitch - Men and the Culture of Needlework’ written by Joseph McBrinn, Published by Bloomsbury in Great Britain in 2021, is the focus of this episode.

The Bloomsbury Set were a very important group of influencers of their time - an influence that, surprisingly, continues to this very day.  They questioned normative thinking about literature, criticism, and economics, not to mention their modern attitudes toward feminism, pacifism, and sexuality, but most of all created a self-fashioned design aesthetic.  ‘They lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’.

I’ve touched on men who stitch before, but the combination of the artistic skills and technical ability of the two men I’m going to feature in this episode is beyond exceptional - and what’s unique is that they collaborate - they live together and they stitch together, creating work that revolves around the reconsidered role of gender - the gay family.

Where would we be without the inspiration and creativity we derived from informative books brimming with crisp, colourful drawings and images?  The Stitch Safari Podcast will now include book reviews pertinent to the topics recently covered.

Sketchbooks are the personalized visual storytelling of an artist’s process that allows us to see behind the scenes, so to speak, to see the successes as well as the failures, that eventually forms into a fully resolved piece of embroidered textile art.