For San Francisco-based textile artist, Lauren DiCioccio, fibers, textiles, and embroideries are connected to memories and nostalgia. Using hand-sewing and hand-embroidery, her art explores the tactility of its materials – how an objects form and disintegrates.
Having studied painting, she began embroidering and sewing with no prior experience outside of doing cross-stitch projects and watching her mom hand-sew Halloween costumes when she was a child. “I‘ve always been attracted to the medium of textiles,” she admitted in an interview with Textile Artist. “I think primarily because of the sense of nostalgia they hold for me.”
“I did a lot of craft projects as a kid and it seems like there was always some kind of textile-based project, from sewing Halloween costumes to doing cross-stitch samplers,” she recalled. “The tactility of the material really makes me feel connected to those memories of my first discoveries of making things and I think this is part of what makes the material so evocative for me.”
Aside from embroidering, her artworks also include sculpting. To make each piece, she works from the inside out, starting with a handful of stuffing and a square of felt, and building shapes and gestures that are determined by the material and her own instinct. After a coherent series of structures develops, she then carefully upholsters, embroiders, wraps, weaves, felts or embellishes over each form individually until it has developed its own identity. Take a look at some of her unique artwork in the gallery below:
