Five Beautiful Things

 

The Embroidered Soul

Peruvian artist Ana Teresa Barboza uses embroidery not to decorate or embellish, but to evoke a visceral and emotional response. Using thread and clothing fragments in unexpected ways in her artwork leads the viewer to look closer, to understand texture and to ask questions about the forms it is layered upon: plants whose tendrils extend beyond the canvas into three-dimensional arrangements, animals whose poses of gentility or aggression appear exaggerated by the caress of intricately layered thread, and bodies whose wounds appear to bleed. “By using embroidery, which is a traditionally feminine language, the images acquire new meaning as they produce a marked dissonance between image and technique,” she says. Click here to see more of her work.