Hunter | Gatherer: Text as Textile

Evidence of fabric embellished with needle and thread has been found as far back as the Cro-Magnon days (30,000 B.C.). The artists featured here, writing with stitchery, challenge our expectations of what is commonly considered a domestic art.

These samples from New York-based illustrator Andrea Dezso’s ironic series Lessons From My Mother illustrate the myths passed down in her Romanian family.

Donna Rumble-Smith

Shadows (2009)

Effluence (2010) photography by Shot in the Dark

Stationary Box (2009)

Heather Johnson delicately embroidered narrative fragments are ephemeral site-specific installations that explore ideas of place, time and memory.

From The Pickup, a collection of works placed throughout lower Manhattan.


Love Letter, which Johnson describes as “works that embody gestures of intimacy between the cities of New York and Paris.”


Her current project in Mexico, In Search of the Frightening and Beautiful, is “a relationship between art and motorcycles.”

Effie Jessop’s interest in language has led to portraits created by meticulously stitched type.

Art in the Woods by Hannah Lamb reflected the sights and sounds of the forest landscape. The text was embroidered on a dissolvable substrate “intended to degrade in wind and rain, responding to the fleeting nature of remembered experiences.”

In the 1890s, seamstress Agnes Richter was a patient at a Heidelberg psychiatric hospital. She manically embroidered her standard issue straightjacket, transforming it into a complex personal journal of her thoughts and experiences.

Graphic designer Evelin Kasiko uses needlework to explore the foundations of type and printing with her CMYK embroidery.

And for a bit of fun….this music video using embroidery!