Embroidery artist Sorrell Chrystal Kerrison describes her techniques as “a bit punk and raw.” “I want to improvise as I go and I love it when accidental mistakes happen, rather than planning every aspect of a piece,” she remarked in an interview with Textile Artist. Indeed, her textile art has an intentional rawness to it.
But then, this isn’t your traditional embroidery work. Rather, her textile work is meant to look like expressionistic paintings, with the needlework imitating brushstrokes. “In the beginning, I felt that my work looked a bit like topography; a two-dimensional, birds-eye version of the map of a face,” said Kerrison. “As my work has developed it has become more and more complex, taking on more of an expressionistic, brushstroke approach.”
Using a range of unconventional and improvisational approaches to her work, her pieces take well over 250 hours to complete. Once she’s picked a subject matter, she sketches it a number of times before scanning and printing the chosen sketch. She then uses a lightbox, tracing on the black of the design using a heat transferable fabric pen, after which she irons the design onto a piece of fabric, attaches it to a hoop or frame and finally begins to sew.
“I just zone in and enjoy the flow and movement of the embroidery,” she describes the process itself. Here are some highlights from her Instagram page.
