Thougths based on the work of The Flowers of London
The sight is the most outstripped sense in me in the beginning of an embroidery. The eyes lead me from the symbols, which represent the color, to the threads. Threads of different colors, which correspond to the same number of symbols. Every color and in turn every thread turn into an ideogram.
When my hands begin to encode the strands, visual perception is accompanied by the touch. No other sense will appear in the creative stage. Finally, I will advance slowly in the scheme of a digital image dismembered in tiny particles of color, the pixels.
The flowers of London, forty-five thousand points of color grouped between them in a chromatic alliance from which there arose an artistic language that by symbols was accompanying me towards the reproduction of the image. The symbolic language synthesized in seventy-five threads – pigments the image that at the end of the process would appear on the cloth.
An image that I captured a while ago with my camera. That I kept jealously, knowing that someday I would reproduce it accurately on a cloth pixel to pixel.
Up to here the technique used in the elaboration of the flowers of London did not change much of the used in other embroideries already made.
My intention was to photograph those flowers again on a cloth using threads, although the tedium gripped me as I was embroidering the environment/landscape/scenery of what in its day caught my attention.
The flowers were the essence of the photograph; could have been in a vase, on a table, in a garden or have been part of some weeds grown at random. Regardless of its context, they had attracted my attention. Were not the vase, neither the table, nor the garden, nor the weeds, which in its day captivated me. Therefore, I should evolve in the creative process and modify the image directly on the fabric
I selected those points of color that were not part of the flowers and yes of its environment. There were points that I undid on the cloth and others that I already did not go so far as to embroider.
So I got de-contextualize the image, reaching the conclusion that the environment is not important when the objective photographed is already on the cloth. The context of the object or of the animated being become a residue that remains eternal in the photography and I have the capacity to eliminate it in the fabric.
Montserrat Gual