Welcome to NeedleXChange, conversations on the artwork of thread. It’s our podcast by which Jamie “Mr X Sew” Chalmers talks with needlework and textile artists about their apply and course of.
Liz Kueneke is an Ibizan-based artist whose community-created maps plot private paths by way of city environments.
She has carried out tasks in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Ibiza, Amsterdam, Barcelona, New York and extra and helps communities to grasp their neighbourhoods by way of participatory embroidery. You’ll be able to hearken to our full interview with Liz on our podcast NeedleXChange!
Her City Cloth venture entails embroidering maps of various cities and welcoming communities to weave their very own narratives into the maps. The venture goals to vary individuals’s perceptions of place and foster a way of connection to their environment.
Liz has carried out these participatory mapping tasks in numerous cities around the globe, together with Barcelona, Manhattan, Bangalore and Morocco. What influences this idea is Liz’s examine of psychogeography, which explores other ways of experiencing and understanding our surroundings.
To create the work, giant hand-embroidered maps of areas are created after which taken to the communities for them to decorate with stitches.
This can be a improbable concept, because the members add worth to the embroidered maps with their very own experiences. It supplies a social historical past to the realm that you simply wouldn’t get from municipal maps.
You’ll be able to inform from the assorted pictures on Liz’s website that she will get terrific engagement from the communities, lots of which have present embroidery traditions inside their cultures.
Not solely is a tangible map of the realm created, but it surely serves as a time capsule of the locations and areas which have worth on the time of creation. It might be fascinating to run the identical venture throughout subsequent many years to find what modifications and what stays the identical.
I feel this can be a great idea and one thing that any group ought to attempt. Needlework expertise will not be crucial and as soon as the map is created any type of embellishment would work. You’ll be able to uncover much more in regards to the tasks on Liz’s web site and in case you’re a part of a craft group, it’s best to give it some critical thought!
Observe Liz Kueneke on Instagram to find the opposite inventive tasks she runs with communities, and if in case you have the time, take pleasure in this video from the City Cloth venture:
Don’t neglect to hearken to our full interview on our Podcast NeedleXChange!
Don’t neglect our different episodes of NeedleXChange, which you discover right here!