Type: Photo embroidery
Technique: Ercigoj stitch
Year: 2012
Edition: Limited
Size: Medium
Dimension: 81 x 54 cm | 31.9 x 21.3 in
Number of stitches: over 700,000
Thread length: over 9 km | over 5.6 mi
Thread colours: 77
Development: over 300 person hours
Price: not for sale
About the artwork
In cooperation with Zvone Šeruga, we have monumentalised two of his best photographs – intimate portraits from his African journeys – into photo embroideries in which we recreated the joy of colours and life with stitched threads. Ethiopian boy is a depiction of an alien and exotic tribesman subjected to a tourists’ gaze.
About the artist
Zvone Šeruga is, and has been for the past couple of decades, quite possibly Slovenian most renowned globetrotter, often coupling his adventurous and hedonistic streak with his love of journalism, photography and film. A world traveller is a short description that says nothing and yet tells everything. Šeruga has been travelling the distant corners of the world with his motorbike for over 40 years, and from his journeys, he keeps bringing amazing photographs.
Features
Innovation of layering
We layer multiple colours of threads and so create rich embroidery and colour texture that is impossible to create with classic one-layer embroidery technique. By layering, we develop colour transitions and shadowing, by which we create multiple-colour surfaces, similar to pointillism painting.
Smooth transitions and shading
By intertwining threads of endless colours and creating colour transitions, we can shape soft shadows, make one surface transition into another and mix colours into an endless multitude of hues. This way, we can also recreate motives from photographs and sophisticated art paintings which wouldn’t be possible with classic embroidery technique, using vector surfaces.
Sophisticated colour calibration
Usually in embroidery, 10 or 20, maybe 30 colours of threads are used. We use around 1,000 colour hues and if a colour still doesn’t match the desired one, we create it by layering and colour transitions. We have digitally scanned colours of all threads by using a spectrograph, so we can colour match any colour from an original material or from CMYK, RGB or Pantone colour schemes.