Michelle Kingdom: Stories in Needlework

This has been a week of discovering beautiful and inspiring embroidered art. The Renaissance art and lavish elegance of the Valentino "Adam and Eve" dress gives way today to the no less beautiful, impressionistic embroideries of Michelle Kingdom, a teacher (and mom) in Los Angeles CA. The thickly laid threads pull shape and color into a very painterly style of story telling. They appear rough, sketched out, imprecise and wonderfully alive and sensual. Kingdom's Adam and Eve allusion ("it had seemed like the beginning of happiness") could be almost any couple, arriving at the first moment of connection anticipating the promise of love (and yet we know the story will quickly become complicated.) But time brings couples together, and their lives and love become deeply intertwined stories. How wonderful is this piece "The years fell, and grew into vines."

And there is more to bind us to children, to friends as in this lovely piece "Tethering." (Not pictured here is also a series I loved called "The Propagation of Daughters" -- done in white on delicate hankies find it on the Flickr Stream.)

Kingdom's stories also reference moments of fairy tales: the swan maiden appears in "the mute swans," the twelve dancing princesses in "even nightingales cannot lives on fairy tales," and Icarus in "Mythology of Tears: tears couldn't save him from flying too close to the sun."

I highly recommend stopping by either Michell Kingdom's pinterest page, or even better, to her Flickr account where you can see a good deal more of her work (really -- it was hard to pick a few favorites among so many favorites). The Flickr account also shows her process -- from sketches to needle -- which is really interesting as well as her paintings. And her "Year of Stitching" poster is so impressive has shamed me into doing more work myself! Kingdom also mentions that she started the Flickr account to push her to make her work public and to keep her producing throughout the year (feeling accountable to the public eye.) And oh...I feel so happy and grateful to her for this chance to see her work.