Sunshine

Embroidery on ink-jet printed photography. 2016

This piece began with a photograph. The subject was my high school boyfriend, caught in a moment of play during a desert adventure. I stood at the bottom of the hill, camera in hand, while he jumped into a cart at the top like it was a throne.

In 2016, I was just returning to embroidery and searching for ways to deepen my photographs- ways to stitch more of myself into the image. I printed the photo and started threading yellow and orange rays of sun into the corner. The original image was stark: a dark figure, a lavender sky. But the thread added warmth, contradiction. A visual tension- light and dark, memory and texture, sky and skin.

It was the first time I realized I didn’t need to choose between mediums. That I could sew sunlight into silence.