An embroidered textile artwork titled “Elegy” featuring red, green, blue, yellow, and pink cross-stitch embroidery in a centered, minimal composition of six descending squares on a printed linen tablecloth.

Elegy, 2003

 
 
 
 

 

I bought a group of cross-stitched tablecloths thinking I would use them to paint on but of course that didn't’t happen. I felt ghosts in these textiles as I often do with well worn objects. After some time the obvious began to dawn on me — cross-stitch embroidery is a mathematical system of organizing color, put it in the service of sentimental representation. This coincidence of sentiment and system was immediately engaging. As I looked I began to see other overlapping dichotomies.

As I understand it, the intention of the average artist, trained or untrained, is both admirable and impossible — to coax mute materials into generating some idea or feeling in an audience. I began to devise a system of my own with which I could alter these embroideries and which might bring several coincidences closer to the surface — art and craft, sentiment and system, ambition and failure, Grandma and MoMA.

While doing this I wanted to retain their ghostly nature, and even highlight the presence of the maker of each original textile. Coming to understand the manufacture of the tablecloths, dresser scarves, and samplers provided an answer. I found decades old blue wash-out ink behind certain stitches. Hidden behind a fold I found printed instructions, behind another was a manufacturer’s mark. The textiles that I was working with are not fully original creations at all but are made from pre-printed kits.

I could see that each original maker still had some agency here — I came across instructions indicating which color should be applied in an area but they didn’t specify which pink for a bloom, which green for leaves. The five-and-dime store would surely have a range of options. In fact, the color palette of each piece turns out to be the sole locus of choice. In the case of some samplers I found that roof-red ended up as roof-brown or black. I came to see that my role was to distill the color palette in each piece to its most intense presentation through a process of reformatting the exact quantity of each color into a stitched arrangement of squares of descending quantity. And removing the old stitches left permanent evidence of earlier handiwork.

All Image Credits: Tom Powel Imaging

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