When I started working with embroidery on photographs I was exploring a psychic terrain. Embroidery is a fine, slow, and gentle skill. I offer it as a healing to an object untethered from its origin story; the analog photograph. The stranger within the photograph, is also the stranger within me. The landscape is the environment we exist within, it too has a soul. When I hold a photograph in my hand I become a medium to channel the ineffable. My process is intuitive, I only follow my needle and thread dictated via the photograph as both personal artifact and an object that has moved through the last two centuries. Each stitch asks in a repetition, “What is the medicine? What is necessary? What do you need? What do I need?”

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Guardians and Elementals was created with an intention to meet the soul of magic (k). I am exploring what is spiritual as an art process. I crave a spirituality that is human sized and soul specific. That is gentle, kind and personal. That is not about scripture and wars in heaven. The spirituality I am interested in channeling, via my needle and thread, is about the beauty and wisdom in the subtle consciousness of nature and the inherent worth of our shared humanity. There’s a current of consciousness that is subtle and softly intelligent and this is what came through for me in the creation of these pieces.

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Guardians are protectors looking out for the best interests of one another. Elementals are unseen nature spirits that correspond to earth, air, water and fire, they live within the etheric energy of the natural world, they hold our physical world in place. We need them.

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My wish, always, for the strangers in the photographs is; that their medicine, is my medicine and my medicine is our medicine. My artwork is an offering that gentleness is worthy and softness is powerful. We are sacred. Earth is sacred. We need each other.

Melanie Isis Tinken