Title: Flower Power Year: 2020 Materials: vintage fabric, thread
In Sicily, my grandmother worked as a seamstress for Italian royalty. In that role, part of her job was to embroider bed and kitchen linens, nightgowns, & baby clothes. As a child I watched as she & my mother embroidered our pillowcases and guest towels. And when I was old enough, i got a hoop and was given projects so that I would learn this craft too. Like many first-generation children, I eschewed many aspects of my family's culture. But through the years, I began to admire embroidery of all sorts and I found myself saving pieces of old pillowcases and guest towels that my mom and grandmother had worked on. During Covid, I revisited some of these pieces and had the time to repurpose them into my own artwork.
This piece, Flower Power, is representative of many passions that I share with these two strong women in my life. The background fabric is a vintage apron; significant because we all love cooking, shared meals, family traditions and conviviality. The vintage fabric flowers could have been used as embellishment on any number of dresses they made for their children and grandchildren. And the embroidered linen was designed and sewn by one of them a long time ago. I chose to embroider an image from a comic of my youth as my contribution to their art. The title, Flower Power, was purposely sewn in a thread color that closely matched the background fabric in the hopes that the viewer would become more intimate with the piece when trying to read it- the stains, fraying and discoloration all valuable pieces of its legacy.
The entire creative endeavor for me was ultimately a meditative one. And I came to understand the significance of this fine craft. Embroidering can be spiritual and centering. It can impart a sense of clarity and calm to both the artist and the viewer. These are all traits which my grandmother and mother embodied and which I admire endlessly.
