Delicately woven leaves and corals emerge from the water, released from a soluble cloth. This is how Australian textile artist and teacher Meredith Woolnough creates her sculptural embroidery. Filmmaker Flore Vallery-Radot documents Woolnough’s process in this beautiful short film: The Embroidered Art of Meredith Woolnough.
Peek into Woolnough’s sketchbooks, browse over her brightly colored threads, get an up-close look as she embroiders her nature-inspired structures, and see how the cloth backing dissolves from the thread skeletons.
Musician Lydia J. Roth accompanies the stunning visuals with her rendition of Gabriel Fairé‘s Fantaisie 2C Op. 79 – Allegro. From Woolnough’s site:
“Meredith’s elegant embroidered traceries capture the beauty and fragility of nature in knotted embroidery threads.”
“The work explores the sculptural possibilities of a unique drawing technique that utilises a domestic sewing machine and a base fabric that dissolves in water. Through a delicate system of tiny stitches Meredith creates intricate and complex openwork compositions that are then carefully pinned in shadowboxes like preserved specimens.”
Meredith Woolnough teaches online courses. She also has a book: Organic Embroidery. Find her on Instagram.
Watch these handpicked related videos next:
• Algorithmically-generated CMYK line portraits
• Embroidered zoetrope animations by Elliot Schultz
• Claudia Bueno’s Yellowstone-inspired line and light installation
• Hand cutting an intricate paper leaf stencil
• The Event of a Thread
• The Red Thread (赤い糸): A single line tells a story
• Microscopically reweaving a 1907 painting
This Webby award-winning video collection exists to help teachers, librarians, and families spark kid wonder and curiosity. TKSST features smarter, more meaningful content than what's usually served up by YouTube's algorithms, and amplifies the creators who make that content.
Curated, kid-friendly, independently-published. Support this mission by becoming a sustaining member today.