Asya Marakulina

The «Embrace» project, like most of my projects, came about naturally. I did embroidery in the evenings to be alone with myself in silence and reflect. Each embroidery starts with a black thread of the same length, which develops from the starting point, moves intuitively, and never repeats the previous pattern. Gradually, I noticed that the thread moves on a principle of attraction and evasion. It simultaneously seeks to connect with the start, as if trying to embrace it, and at the same time avoids completion or fusion as soon as it approaches.

It seemed to me that this reflects the way the human psyche works: it goes back to certain starting points and tries to replay them. We often do this in relationships: strive for intimacy and keep our distance. When the embroidery process exhausted itself, I wanted to create a series of tattoos.

Embroidery is very close to tattooing: a thread passes into the fabric as tattoo ink penetrate the skin. While transferring the embroidered "embraces" onto the skin of other people, I realized that the most important thing is to spend time with a person, to overcome the distance between the artist and the viewer. The viewer becomes the bearer and full-fledged co-author of one "embrace".