'It really makes me think that paint is just so pointless...' - Louise Riley



London based embroidery artist, Louise Riley caught my attention last year while paging through the Cross Stitcher mag, enjoying my morning cuppa. Her work is ingenious- she stitches threaded images onto mattresses! As i myself, am always looking for different mediums or surfaces to sew into, her use of thread and the mattress surface creates such an intimate and unique setting for her subject matter. This initmacy is what i love about her work, she uses thread as she would oil paint, creating this complex web of tactility.

Louise- 'I use the mattress as a backgroundless background that holds weight of experience conceptually, spiritually and physically. Blood, sweat and tears like tree rings in its core. Its presence in our rights of passage, our sleep, rest, thoughts, dreams, the theatre of life spilled out onto it. How could I work on anything else! It is a ready-made canvas, it allows my ideas to penetrate it and collaborate with it to unearth a supposed breath-taking, yet ordinary, history or herstory.'

Here are some of my favourite works by this stitcher! 




Joined at the hip and bent over backwards (2008).

The balance of joy and pain and struggle and everything in between. the force that draws us together and the force that keeps us individual, the push and pull.



<>

Dewlyweds (2010).

The inspiration for Dewlyweds came when searching for something that resembled marriage in the animal kingdom, since the design of marriage had been a societal one and may not have necessarily been what nature intended. When snails mate they shoot calcium spears into each others flesh to disable each other, so that fertilisation takes place without the possibility of any other 'suitors' getting involved. This seemed a good comparison.



  Film Still (2008)