colourful sayings

feeling blue

tickled pink

good as gold

The Words You Say Are Not the Words I Mean (Colourful Sayings), 2009
Cotton-linen napkins (secondhand), embroidery thread.

Created for the Open Source Embroidery (OSE) exhibition, first shown at Bildmuseet (Umeå, SE) and then the Museum of Craft & Folk Art (San Francisco, CA, USA). As OSE explores open-source approaches to computing and craft, I wanted to connect those themes with language, perhaps one of the most natural arenas for open-source creation and adaptation.

As a foreigner in northern Sweden, I was fascinated by the way language can be a medium for both connection, in the case of shared language, and alienation, when there are language differences, much as technology can both unite and divide.

American/English idioms that mention color are hand-embroidered on cloth, with HTML hexidecimal codes in place of the colors. HTML hex codes use a combination of letters and numbers to define color for computer display. Idioms and expressions are a way of embellishing or embroidering the bare structure of a language, and in this case, literally “adding color” to communication.

Since idioms are by definition specific to a region, period or people, the meaning may not always translate. The work aimed to encourage conversation amongst museum visitors, in explaining the meaning of the HTML code as well as the cultural and linguistic roots of the idioms.

It was important to me that the pieces be completely hand-embroidered, to reflect the process of learning by doing and experimenting. When I was learning to work with HTML in the late ’90s, as part of the dot-com boom, I much preferred to forgo the fancy software and just hand-code everything in Notepad, the better to understand and control the process. With these pieces, I was learning how to embroider as I went along.