Ana Teresa Barboza is a textile artist from Lima, Peru, where she still has her workshop. Much of her earlier work focussed on the human body and the means by which embroidery could be applied to fragment, recompose and decorate the body. She also is interested how dress is used to reflect different relationships. She also explores the use of 'feminine' embroidery to articulate situations of affection and agression.
Izziyana Suhaimi is a Singapore-based textile artist who works principally with weaving and embroidery techniques. Her work is characterised by a combination of illustration and embroidery, as for instance portraits of women decorated with geometric or floral embroidered motifs (see illustration below).
Cayce Zavaglia is an American painter and embroidery artist who is best known for her embroidered portraits. She herself refers to this aspect of her work as "thread painting' or "renegade embroidery". Starting from a photograph, she works her embroideries with 1-stranded thread on a linen ground material. All her portraits are not larger than about 20 x 25 cm. She said herself:
Lisa Smirnova is a Russian-born and Moscow-based artist who creates cery colourful embroideries that sometimes resemble pencil drawings. She embroiders representations of famous people, but also of unknown people, tattoed men and animals. Her work is extremely time-consuming and may take months to complete. Recently, she also ran a project embroidering garments, together with the fashion band GO.
Juana Gomez is a Chilean artist and was born in Santiago, Chili in 1980. She is particularly known for her embroideries that show the human body, worked over faded photographs. Her embroideries show the veins, muscles and nerves of the human body.
Emillie Ferris is an artist from Suffolk, England, who specialises in the creation of hooped embroideries with detailed depictions of mushrooms, bees, rabbits, foxes, and other woodland creatures, but she also embroiders representations of pet animals. She calls it 'hoop-art', and the embroideries when completed are not detached from the frame.
Sophie Standing was born in Britain, but since 2003 lives in Kenya. Most of her machine-made embroideries, which can be very large, represent animals or wildlife scenes and landscapes. She studied wood, ceramics, metal and textiles art at Liverpool Hope University.
Hiroko Kubota is a Japanese needlework artist who is especially famous for her 'cat shirts'. She made her first cat shirt for her son. Photographs were published in social media, and these went viral. She subsequently opened an Etsy shop with the name of Go!Go!5 and she sold the embroidered shirts for some 250 to 300 US dollar a piece.
Kazuhito Takadoi is a contemporary needlework artist who works on the main theme of 'nature'. All the materials he uses are taken from nature and dried before before being worked. His embroideries are minimalistic, and he plays with shadows.
Inge Jacobson is a modern needlework artist from Ireland, now living in England, who uses commercial imagery and thread to alter the picture and give it a completely different twist. She recently worked for American Express to change three of their classic images. She studied photography at Kingston University, London.
More...
Debbie Smyth is a modern embroidery artist from Ireland who started work in 2009. She creates forms of art (installations, designs) by carefully plotting pins and stretching thread between them. Her works may be called thread drawings. They are both two- and three-dimensional and generally of a large scale. She created art work for the firms of Adidas, Hermes, and Sony, and for the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestre.
St. Clare is the patron saint of embroiderers. Her feast day is the 11th August. She is often considered as the first Franciscan nun. She was an embroideress and her convent decorated many liturgical vestments for the Franciscans. She is the patron saint of eye disorders, and of television, but that is a different story.
The National Needlework Archive (NNA) was established in 2008 and in 2010 moved to The Old Chapel, Greenham Business Centre, Newbury, which is also the home of the Old Chapel Textile Centre. The NNA keeps a documentary and photographic record of needlework located in the community in the UK. It also maintains an extensive textile-related library.
The Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Needlework was set up in 1977 by a group of professional Jewish needle artists in New York. These women shared a common interest in Jewish tradition and the desire to create new and beautiful ceremonial objects for the home and synagogue. The Guild publishes the Paper Pomegranate.