Somewhere between heaven and hell, here we are.
After much back and forth, I’m finally calling this piece complete. There are many things I would do differently if I were to create the piece again, but that’s the great thing about creative exploration: you always learn so much in the process, and I’ve learned a great deal while working on this one. Overall, I think the result is pretty cool. There are flaws and problems, but as I’ve discovered—especially with this piece—that is often what makes the art.
This picture was one of the first I photographs I had printed with embroidering it in mind, and yet it took me over a year to start because I just didn’t feel like I could fully realize what I wanted to do with it. Back then I was setting myself much stricter rules when it came to the creation of my art. If I was going to do a piece, I could only use that photograph once and I would never re-do it. The art was to be a representation of me exactly where I was at that time and to re-do a piece or undo any of it would go against the authenticity of the art I wanted to create. Fast forward to the present day and I’m using scissors to cut out parts of the work I don’t like, re-embroidering through holes that had originally held another design, breaking my own rules, breaking other peoples rules, making art.
The piece somewhat represents where I am right now on my healing journey, somewhere between heaven and hell, exhausted. The punitive super-ego, hell, trauma, CPTSD and Healing, heaven, recovery, health, I am somewhere in-between after four years of treatment. Exhausted.
Designing the piece.
When it came to designing this piece already had lots of ideas, but they were complicated ideas, ideas that were too complicated for where my skill level was at. How on earth would I even embroider THAT idea onto this photograph? After many redesigns I finally settled on the design you see today, hoping that I could somehow pull it off.
With some of my work I will import the photograph into procreate first and create some ideas there, this part of the process helps me to visualize an idea before I start putting thread to paper. Some of my pieces go through 4 or 5 iterations of ideas before I finally settle on one. You can see here the two designs I had done in procreate for this piece, one being the idea I ran with. I think its pretty representative of the final outcome.
Inspiration
With some pieces an idea will just come to me, and for others I’ll have the idea of a theme I wish to explore and go looking in that direction. For this piece both of these were true. The design I ended up going with was spawned from the original idea that just came to me, but I required some additional inspiration as to know where to go next. Here are two of the biggest inspirations and references that I ended up drawing from.
Process, exploration and despair.
The fissures were the most difficult but also most rewarding and time consuming part of the piece. When I first began embroidering them I used 6 strands of thread and it was far too thick, even for the closest parts, but I wanted to give the illusion of depth so playing with the number of strands was imperative to this piece.
Early work in progress. Additional mistakes were made whilst outlining the piece which meant I had to put the beams in-front of the outlines on the side. Sadly this detracted more from the illusion I had hoped to achieve with this piece. You can also see how chunky the 6 strands were on the bottom right of the piece. This section was cut away and redone.
I landed on using between 1 and 4 strands. 4 strands on the fissures closer, where the viewer would be standing, and 1 for those further away near the back of the organ. Those 6 strands I had originally used were cut out and replaced with 4 strands, it honestly felt quite invigorating to destroy part of the work i had spent time on. Part of me even toyed with the idea of leaving the cut strands dangling as proof of my own destruction. I decided against that as despite wanting the piece to be raw, I was enjoying the process of creating and learning to create a more 3D effect with some thread painting which I had begun to explore before I made the cuts. This wasn’t the only part which I decided to cut and remove. Some of the beams of light also suffered a similar fate, I took the scissors to several of these too. Removing threads that were too thick or overlapping others, a lot of the holes at the top of the piece have multiple threads in them to help create a fuller effect that radiates out so I could make some small adjustments there. If I was to do this piece again I wouldn’t make that section so dense. As you may have noticed, in the original design I had put all the beams behind the organ to again lean into that sense of depth. Due to some early on mistakes I had to adjust that design to compensate which resulted in the beams coming across over both sides and giving the organ a little bit of a house shape. I don’t hate it, but it wasn’t intended. A happy little accident of sorts.
Original Photograph.
The original photograph itself was also a happy little accident, something we stumbled upon several years ago now whilst visiting Uppsala. Despite not being religious, I love visiting churches and cathedrals. There is something about the eeriness and feeling when inside them that I can’t describe. If you’re like me you’ll know exactly what I mean. Entering any of these places fills me with a sense of not being alone, a solemnness and awe. I feel connected to family that have passed and I will always light a candle if it’s possible to do so. But I digress, on this occasion we entered the famous Uppsala domkyrka (Uppsala cathedral) to find a man playing the organ with several people already seated and watching him. Naturally we also sat to listen, what were the chances? Of all the churches and cathedrals I have visited, never once have I entered to find someone playing to an open crowd. While he played I nervously snuck in the center of the aisle, crouched so as not to get in anyone’s line of sight. I did this several times and it wasn’t until I got home that I saw that I had captured this brief moment of respite he had taken between songs. To look at the photo in isolation it gives me a deep feeling of sadness, of loss, exhaustion and regret. I love that. When a photograph can make me feel so deeply and so connected with the moment is just the greatest gift.
I edited several versions of the raw, each time giving it a slightly different feel and to this day I still cannot pick my favourite version. One of the versions I created was lovecraftian inspired and which I lovingly titled ”the summoners exhaustion”. I did consider using this edit for the embroidery piece but it didn’t quite fit with what I had in mind, but never say never. I had a lot more ideas than I put to paper and given my love for this photograph I think it would be a great one to revisit in a few years time to see how far I’ve come.
This wasn’t the only photograph I captured on the day, there were a bunch more that I really did like at the time. The inner saboteur part of me wants to sneer as I look back at some of these pictures, even at the original shot of the photograph I used for this piece. It’s voice asking why I felt so proud of them at the time and it’s been a difficult voice to come to terms with. Distance in the form of time helps me to come to terms with sharing older pictures, I can see the flaws better now because I am a better photographer. I understand more behind the technicalities of the camera I am using, hell, I am using a much better camera these days.