Finalist

Drawing with thread is at the heart of Rosie Sykes’ hand embroidery practice. She is compelled by narrative, creating a web that ties together all aspects of her current process, devising a story and character for each project.

Always beginning with illustration Rosie uses lines to capture the details of a subject, then allowing these to translate into technical embroidery.

Inspired by the way lives can be documented through photography, across birthdays, friendships, and historical events; cameras are the main focus of the project.

Immortality, Memory, and Obsession. ‘Camera Obscura’ depicts the extended life of a woman through costume, whose slow memory loss is depicted through hand embroidered imagery of vintage cameras.

Rosie illustrated the story of this unnamed character’s life, looks from their early life in the 1800s, up until the 1960s. The 1940s look was then embroidered using a mixture of metal threads and wool, onto vintage garments.

Immortality, Memory, and Obsession. ‘Camera Obscura’ depicts the extended life of a woman, whose slow memory loss is depicted through hand embroidered imagery of vintage cameras. Captivated by narrative, Rosie depicts this story using vintage garments, with the costume presenting this characters breaking point. Born in the late 1600s this character, an unnamed women, is forced to watch the world change around her, family and friends dying as everything she understands slips away as her life continues, longer than it should. After centuries, her brain can no longer remember efficiently, causing her to forget everything dear to her. She forms an obsession with cameras, as they remain the only way of remembering the world around her.

Rosie knew immediately that she wanted to Interpret the traces of transition through photography. And this developed into a story of a woman, trapped within time as the layers of her life are lost to her, with photographs being the only way she can piece together the centuries of her past.

Rosie originally explored cameras through illustrative methods. Breaking down their structure and capturing extensive detail. Then translating these marks into her embroidery, through a tambour method, stitching as if she was drawing with a pen. Enhancing this illustrative feel through embroidery techniques such as Goldwork, Blackwork, Canvaswork and Raised work to create detail and texture. Working experimentally to create a sporadic feel, wanting to display the chaos experienced in this unnamed women’s head, Rosie combines techniques and methods loosely. Echoing the lack of clarity experienced by this character, struggling to understand the technological advances in a century she was never meant to experience. Through her embroidered narrative Rosie wants to draw the viewer in and whisk them into a new world, intriguing them with a 1940s inspired costume. Rosie’s embroidery captures detailed camera motifs which clutter the costume, colliding and hovering over the garments, representative of this unnamed character’s fracturing mind.