My work appropriates a craft associated with family nurturing to the sociopolitical sphere of the cloistered taboo female body and to the geopolitical turmoil in real time. My work adopts ‘folk’ art typically associated with female silence and oppression to the public sphere and the professional art context. By embroidering erotically charged images of women captured in positions of powerlessness and extreme exposure, in compositions whose public nature is enhanced by stencils and tags, I want to out the invisible. As a new Greek mother, I am weighted by the gravity of a past featuring needlepoint as domestic woman’s signature: Penelope weaves while Odysseus fights Cyclops and beds Circe; Medea can only revenge her husband’s mistress by poisoning the gown she has embroidered. I embrace this legacy by ‘invading’ women’s privacy for political rather than pornographic purposes, in an effort to turn the female repressed into the irrepressible without forgetting that for thousands of years needlework has been women’s communal form of expression and exchange. I build a landscape of memory and tenderness, with the female body as the ideal home—a hedge against mortality.
I portray self-sufficient, autoerotic women secluded in harems, dungeons, or boudoirs away from the male gaze & yet forever posing for that gaze. My viewpoint is from within the women’s world. I show what happens inside women’s quarters behind closed doors, bringing out into the open the sights and secrets of new feminine models free of shame. My subjects are juxtaposed to architectural monuments--high cultural symbols, towers & other manmade erections that declare man’s primacy over nature, just as formal art has done--or to the embellishments of the ‘feminine’ aesthetic—flowers, birds, pets, hearts, love notes—that echo the absence of authentic meaning and show the sublimations that govern our daily lives. Every work has a textual message--a paradox, intended to ‘translate’ the women into generic language, while they pose mutely. Some texts are in dead tongues salvaged in fragments excavated out of the Egyptian desert--ranging from the oldest Greek writing in Linear B dating at 2000BC to poems by the Lesbian Sappho from 600BC--some are political slogans, and some are advertisements. I use them as street graffiti--a sister illegitimate art, the in-your-face unpaid art form of which embroidery is the closeted twin--to protest the conventional place of women within the spectrum of labor and art history, and the puritanism of institutionalized feminism; to assert the co-existence of power & desire, exposure & elusiveness; to reclaim the complexity of the feminine experience. I am interested in the marriage of Eastern & Western forms, the lyricism & sensuality of form (& stitch) juxtaposed with the speed & illustrative flatness of pop modernity and mass-market culture and late capitalism.
I have been painting and embroidering, on and off, all my life, but I have made my living as a writer. I have published three books and numerous articles in national magazines and have taught creative writing. Sexuality has always been my metaphor of choice, because it is repressed. My underlying theme is often the rape of space by time. fs
As a child I spent countless peaceful afternoons on my island embroidering on the balcony with my mother. When I turned fourteen, I realized that embroidery received no respect from patriarchy. My Dad, uncles, and authority figures were blind to the piles of embroidery around every house. I vowed to do art that would carry weight in society. I joined a group that sprayed graffiti on city walls at night and ran away from the sirens carrying spilling buckets of red paint in my hands. Months later I ran off to America. Here I discovered my sexual being and the female body. I studied Fine Arts and creative writing. I painted. I wrote poems. I shot movies. I did performance art. I was heard.
On my visit to a Breast Center for my first routine mammogram, I sat next to a luminous woman who was embroidering fanatically. We clicked. I ran to the art store and completed a piece that week, using painter’s canvas & drawing. My first mammogram led to my first ultrasound, which led to the biopsy of a sizable lump, performed by a woman with a very long needle in her hand, and to a long wait for the call with the results. Back home, when the going got tough the women got together in a sewing circle. I stitched away. Eventually the doctor clipped me like nude cattle: she planted a steel clip over my heart, land-marking that lump for life. That lump reunited me with my roots.
Embroidery is not a borrowed language for me, as painting and writing, especially in English, have been. Even in my native Greek, I am weighed down by the gravity of the ancestral classical past. Needlework has played an important role in feminist art. Since the 70s, feminists have challenged the boundaries that divide art from craft, masculine from feminine, mind from body and other inherited dichotomies, by incorporating embroidery into gallery-quality art. Artists like Kate Walker, Judy Chicago, Elaine Reichek, Ghada Amer appropriated fabric art to point to women’s history and reality.
For centuries, embroidery was a source of pleasure for women, even as it showcased their powerlessness, unpaid labor, and neglected individuality, and inculcated quietude, order, and household industriousness—the constraints of femininity—in them. Needlework is a communal art. As with building a house, it takes patience and repetition. As with most repetition, it is ritualistic, like reciting a chant. The dogged handiwork evokes the unconscious remembering of age-old matriarchal fertility and devotion.
As it was for my ancestors, embroidering is my daily meditation, my grounding, and my drug of choice: I embroider the stress away. I turn full circle. I take embroidery with me wherever I am, as the older women in my family did in the old country. It is mesmerizing to watch a woman embroider. Wherever I go, I make connections. People tell me their embroidery narratives. People who have no appreciation for ‘high’ art--underprivileged minorities and working women—embrace my work because they feel comfortable with the medium. It is a cultural icebreaker. It opens up borders.
When I embroider, I am channeling my ancestors. My stitched canvases reconnect me to my mother, aunts, grandmothers, to generations of caretakers and makers who toiled at the loom and the needle and passed on to me their elaborate handiwork as my dowry--the talismanic blessing every bride takes from her maternal home, which I keep in cedar-lined trunks till I pass it on to my daughter. Being an embroiderer is being a seeker. When I work, I visualize an open white space in the center of my chest where truth resides. I feel I am embroidering a prayer. I invite people passing by to make a few stitches. Traditionally, all of my work would go to my daughter on her wedding day in a sealed wooden trunk that symbolizes entrapment. Instead, I hang it up on big walls in the center of the most heavily walked strip of my city. It’s time.
Eurydice