Threaded Bestiary

Ingrid Farcaș

My practice is rooted in the language of textiles, with sewing, embroidery, weaving, and the physical construction of thread on fabric forming the foundation of my visual vocabulary. I approach these techniques not asta decorative or purely craft‑based processes, but as a way of drawing, painting, building images, and constructing alternative worlds.

For me, thread functions in much the same way that paint functions for a painter or line functions for a draughtsperson. Each stitch is a mark. Each repetition creates rhythm, density, direction, and movement. Through the accumulation of thousands of small gestures, an image gradually emerges from the surface. The slowness of this process is essential to the work: the image is not simply represented on the fabric, but physically constructed through time, attention, repetition, and touch.

I am particularly interested in the tension between the apparent delicacy of textile work and the complexity or strangeness of the worlds that it can contain. Embroidery carries strong associations with domesticity, tradition, patience, ornament, and inherited forms of knowledge. I deliberately bring these associations into contact with imagery that can be surreal, mysterious, humorous, unsettling, or fantastical. In this way, the familiar language of textile craft becomes a vehicle for constructing unfamiliar narratives. Precision is central to my practice. Repetition and pattern allow me to create complex structures from very simple actions. A single stitch may appear insignificant, but thousands of stitches can produce an intricate visual system.

This process also creates a particular relationship with time. Unlike an image produced rapidly through mechanical or digital means, a sewn image records the duration of its own making. The surface becomes a kind of archive of gestures. Every section contains evidence of decisions, corrections, repetitions, pauses, and sustained attention. The finished work therefore exists simultaneously as an image and as a record of the time required to make it.

My imagery often moves between the recognizable and the imaginary. Animals, human figures, landscapes, architectural elements, natural forms, and other familiar motifs can become part of scenes that do not entirely belong to the real world. I am interested in this moment of uncertainty, when the viewer recognizes something but cannot completely explain the world in which it exists. This allows the works to operate somewhere between memory, fantasy, folklore, dream, and contemporary visual culture.

I see embroidery and textile construction as a form of slow image‑making. The needle becomes both tool and drawing instrument; thread becomes line and color; fabric becomes both support and part of the composition. Through this process, I explore how patience, repetition, material, and imagination can come together to create images.

Ingrid Farcaș