Type: Photo embroidery
Technique: Ercigoj stitch
Year: 2016 - ongoing
Edition: Limited (10)
Size: Large
Dimension: 150 x 80 cm | 59.1 x 31.5 in
Number of stitches: over 4 mio
Thread length: over 48 km | over 29.8 mi
Thread colours: 41
Development: over 700 person hours
Price: on request
Also available in:
- 200 x 106 cm | 78.7 x 41.7 in, limited edition (5)
About the artwork
A hidden menace: a minefield from the Balkan wars near Vranje, Serbia. A defensive structure of the Serbian Army left behind from war against NATO in the nineties. As pioneer plants are overgrowing the fields, they are slowly turning into a virgin forest. This faceted artwork is put together from 20 small photo embroideries, each functioning as its own picture, but combined they create a completely new image with an amazing depth.
About the artist
Chris de Bode is drawn to dramatic stories of people, especially children. His photographic work was commissioned by several non-governmental organisations like Save the Children, Aids Funds/Stop Aids Now, MSF, Greenpeace, VSO, CARE, Oxfam, Cordaid and also several UN branches like UNFPA, UNHCR and WHO. He is also acknowledged author of documentary films. He has broad experience in mentoring workshops in several countries educating photographers on all levels focusing on story telling in pictures. A winner of first prize World Press Photo award. Born 1965 in the Netherlands.
Based on an exclusive licence agreement with Ercigoj, five of his best photographs were monumentalized in Ercigoj stitch technique. They encompass a wide range of motifs, from art to documentary photography. Each one is available in limited edition in different sizes. Each one comes with a Certificate of authenticity, hand signed by de Bode.
Features
Extra big formats
The main problem of big format embroideries are material contractions that make it difficult to correctly position all the details of a motif. To overcome such deformations and other problems, over decades of creating big embroideries, we have developed technical and software solutions that enable us to deliver perfect embroideries of any dimensions and number of stitches.
Extraordinary number of stitches
In a classic embroidery, the number of stitches is somewhere between 20,000 and 200,000, and is limited by stretching and contracting of materials. By overcoming this limitations, we are able to make embroideries with millions of stitches which enables us to produce photorealistic embroideries and recreate any painting of any artistic style.
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.