Embroidery Hands

Yarn, fabric

Various Dimensions

2017

My hands were inspired by Richard Anuszkiewicz’s optical art. Anuszkiewicz was formally exploring the phenomena of light, color, and line and their effects on human perception Anuszkiewicz combined his idea of perception and color and produced paintings whose vibrant colors and geometric shapes appeared to pup and pulsate off the canvases. I was inspired by his All Things Live in the Three. This piece consists of three orange diamonds with green dots on a background of red with blue dots and with red patterns in the orange diamonds and seem to shift under the eye. His work is almost scientific and mathematical to which he has to be in order for the optical illusion affect to work.

I was interested in Anuszkiewicz’s use of colors and lines to distort the viewer’s vision. I began hand stitching these pieces using more cool colors and warm colors and used freeform lines. Additionally, I was interested in embroidery because it is something that I have never experimented with. Embroidery can be traced back to hundreds of years back and although it started as a way to tailor and mend clothing, techniques were developed and opened up the possibilities for decorative stitching. Two of the hands I choose to make them recede in the background because I wanted them to be harder to spot. I wanted the hands to reveal themselves slowly to the viewer. With the third hand, I wanted to take a risk and used a different color scheme to make the hands be more visible. Optical Illusions can use color, light and patterns to create images that can be deceptive or misleading to our brains. The information gathered by the eye is processed by the brain, creating a perception that in reality, does not match the true image. Perception refers to the interpretation of what we take in through our eyes.