Family Selfie

Throughout this semester I wanted to challenge myself and look at working with calico, watercolour and stitch looking at figures in photographs, I also wanted this piece to be very personal to me and be in memory of my nanna as well as be a public piece.

For this project I wanted to look at how The Walker Gallery is a very family friendly gallery but not everyone can Remember seeing all the gallery which gave me the idea to look at how our minds might betray what we remember. The piece I created was called “Family selfie” and its 8” x 8” and the media used was water colour and stitch on calico, it is about the idea of remembering little bits like colour of someone’s hair or the colour of what they are wearing, this piece is also about patchy memories and tangled thoughts, so you can remember what colour hair someone has but you can’t remember their facial features or brand of clothing they had on which ties in with why this piece is in the café. People tend to spilt up when walking around a gallery then all come together when they want a spot of lunch but they don’t tend to remember sitting in the cafe or they just don’t speak about it, so I thought this piece is ideal for the café.

For this project, I looked at artist such as Ana Teresa Barboza, Izziyana Suhaimi and Sheena Liam. I look at Ana’s landscape embroidery work because I really like how she has let the piece flow and extend beyond the hoop. I look at Izziyanas embroidery and painting portraits out of a collection called “The Looms in Our Bones”. I really like the contrast between the paint and the embroidery and how the embroidery gives the work a bit of character. I look at Sheena’s hand sewn illustrations because I really like how the artist creates the hair realistically and I like how it comes of the page like graceful dangling hair and the rest of the piece remines 2D.

I think that if I had longer time on this project I would have looked at creating a series of these watercolour and stitch calico pieces and look at different scales and angles, maybe extend the threads so their touching the ground. I think that I would also look at instead of letting the threads all fall to the floor, I would look at weaving then together and let the piece fall down that way like what Ana Teresa Barboza does or use accents of embroidery to make a certain area stand out like what Izziyana Suhamimi does in her portrait embroidery pieces.