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Art & Design MAY <strong>2019</strong>: ISSUE 96 art sphere reflects the complexity of our time, with “The innumerable entry and focal points. Embroidery is creating inroads within fine art, though is still underappreciated and undervalued,” reflects Michelle Kingdom, contemplatively choosing her words as she does each of her carefully-placed threads. “My own work doesn’t easily fall into an established art category. I am not part of a movement. I work in isolation, and have found a supportive audience mostly by happenstance. I’m trained in drawing and painting yet I’ve pursued another medium with the visionary approach of an outsider,” she adds. It feels an odd approach to quiz an artist about why, more often than not, their niche is neglected by the wider art world. But in this case, it’s a way of unspooling why Kingdom’s majestic miniature masterpieces should be admired. Still, Kingdom admits that the obscurity of embroidery was a place in which to find creative shelter, and she started out by creating in secrecy. “I never showed my work to anyone because I didn’t think it would be of interest,” she shrugs. “So often, textile work was overlooked as mere craft, and needlework especially was fraught with stigma. It was for grandmothers or colonial school girls; small in scale, fussy, domestic, nostalgic, and deemed irrelevant. This was precisely why I adored it and found it to be the perfect channel to tap into the murky world of the psyche.” An art lover who grew up in a “creative house”, Kingdom studied drawing, painting and traditional fine art at university in the early 1990s, when the art world “Was dominated by work that was oversized, highly conceptual, ironic and impossibly clever. It mostly left me cold and I never thought art was a viable career path,” she recounts. “I dabbled in various textile mediums on my own, and it was around that time that I started creating these odd, tiny stories in thread.” Those early pieces were mainly “A safe refuge off the judgmental radar of the ‘serious’ art world”, Kingdom confesses. “It was a chance to create something solely for me. I fell in love with figurative embroidery immediately. Something about it was primitive, From the Periphery The woven vignettes of Michelle Kingdom have made an underappreciated art medium her own realm WORDS: CHRIS UJMA strange and awkward, which struck me as compelling, raw and honest; there was something beautifully fragile, odd and otherworldly about it. Figurative embroidery seemed tailor-made for expressing secret thoughts.” Years later, she defines her contemporary output as, “An exploration of psychological landscapes; an attempt to illuminate thoughts left unspoken or that are unable to be expressed adequately with words. By creating tiny worlds in thread, I hope to capture elusive yet persistent inner voices. Symbolism and allegory examine the juxtaposing dynamics of aspiration and limitation, expectation and loss, belonging and alienation, truth and illusion.” While appearing as dreamscapes, it is literary snippets, memories, personal Opposite: Primavera, <strong>2019</strong> Above: Without Question, 2018 mythologies, and art historical references that all inform the imagery. She looks to medieval manuscripts, ancient art, symbolism and outsider art for inspiration. As for the technique, sometimes Kingdom has a clear concept from the beginning, but more often has several vague images and ideas that she wishes to investigate. Her stitching is done with a “dense, intuitive, fluid approach and each piece stays in flux until the very end,” she explains. “More and more I move away from traditional stitch technique and prefer to play with intuitive ways to recreate the genre. Fulfilling a fixed idea in my head doesn’t interest me because it is the process that I find intriguing.” Through exhibitions her work has risen to prominence, and Kingdom’s 25