Michelle Kingdom’s Curious Embroidery

“Beauty parallels melancholy, as conventional stitches acquiesce to the fragile and expressive.”
Capturing elusive yet persistent inner voices, Kingdom’s imagery has many references to art and history, memories and personal mythologies. Fused together, they explore relationship, domesticity and self-perception. Through her artworks, Kingdom reveals the dynamics of aspiration and limitation, expectation and loss, belonging and alienation, truth and illusion. Small-scale scenes are densely embroidered into compressed compositions. “While the work acknowledges the luster and lineage inherent in needlework, I use thread as a sketching tool in order to simultaneously honor and undermine this tradition. Beauty parallels melancholy, as conventional stitches acquiesce to the fragile and expressive,” the artist says.