Adobe Collabogram

In 2016 I was approached to be a part of the Adobe Collabograms project. A project where Adobe pairs up two people of different disciplines and commissions a collaboration. I was paired up with David Madero, a metal artist in Mexico.

Although it was one of the first major projects for me at the beginning of my embroidery journey, and my skills have developed somewhat, I still look at the process with such a full heart.

When I saw Davids work I was floored. His sculptures are amazing and I was at a complete loss at how we would combine our crafts. When we first met over Skype it was quite surreal, we have similar values and from the get-go had a lot of complimenting strengths. We established that whatever we were going to create, had to tick the ‘Ive always wanted to do this’ box for both of us. We were instantly supportive of each other and it was super easy. We knew we were friends after about 15 minutes of conversation. Throughout the process, which was challenging for me at various points David coached me through with relentless kindness and support.

One thing that stood out to us was even though our personalities were so compatible, our work had such strong contrast in almost every way. David's work is very masculine and strong in its subject and material. Working with embroidery, historically known as woman's work, is light, colourful and soft. From the jump, we knew we wanted to show this contrast, instead of one of us moving into the realms of the other. Complimenting instead of compromising.

Playing around with ideas we settled on the scorpion, which even looking at images made me uncomfortable, so we knew that was a great platform to start. The scorpion is such a fearsome creature. Its whole being is built to fight. Armoured and armed, it epitomises masculinity. It was the perfect choice for us as it is aggressive and highly weaponized, but shows a deadly beauty through its hard and soft features. We sought to change its symbolism of danger by adding something a tad more whimsical, while not compromising its nobility and natural beauty.

The 'weapons' of the scorpion were embellished with portraits of women interacting with nature; a face hidden behind a protea, an eye covered by a flower and flamingo and a woman lying with a fox.  The colourful embroidery on the stark metal sculpture, adorning it and its ‘weapons’ highlights both the beauty and cruelty of nature. The piece is about duality, the duality around us, in us and between us.