I was trying to keep one of my favourite textile artists to myself, but I am feeling generous (not to mention that I am short on ideas for a blog post), so I will share. Her name is Hinke Schreuders and she was born in 1969 in Amsterdam.
She is best known for taking pages from old magazines, mostly images of women from 1950s and 1960s, and altering them with embroidery. I have tried to do this myself but found it a difficult medium as Hinke mentions in an interview for The Hedgerow Review (link below): “The fact that the photos are printed pages from old magazines does make for a vulnerable working surface, since the paper usually is old, yellowed, and somewhat brittle. I like it that this quality emphasizes the human and personal vulnerability that exists as a subject in my work.”
Hinke affixes the images to linen and applies a layer of hand-stitched embroidery, beading, lace, and flourishes of ink to alter the images to something that can be, at times, slightly unsettling.
Womanhood and femininity are the subjects of much of her work “I am interested in the duality of femininity, and what it means to be a woman. To me, the mannequins from fifties’ magazines embody certain feminine archetypes and from this “research framework,” I expand outward through my art”. With her work, Schreuders says she seeks to “subtly confuse notions of feminine vulnerability and reinforce the position of embroidery as an artistic medium,”.
It wasn’t her work featuring women that initially drew my attention, but rather her work on images of nature and landscapes. There are not as many pieces of this kind in her collection, but they are so beautiful! The pieces seen here are part of an ongoing series called Works on Paper. By overstitching and almost obscuring parts of the image, Hinke has managed to enhance the view making details jump to the foreground.
I hope you will be inspired to look differently now at old magazines or photographs – think of what a few embroidery stitches could do to them!
Another series of her work involves telling a story, with just a few embroidered words on old linen cloths. It really does make me want to know the full story and to pull out some old linens from my attic for repurposing.
Hinke’s Website: http://www.sudsandsoda.com/works/
Full text of interview:
