Data + Embroidery

Jordan Cunliffe meticulously stitches stories from data she has collected into her artisan embroidery pieces. Sometimes she uses data that she records about her own life, like every time she fed her daughter for the first year of her daughter's life, and sometimes she finds something interesting as inspiration, like a book of mathematical tables at a second hand store. She also sells original works of embroidery on vintage architectural drawings, and takes commissions for custom architectural embroideries. She shares her work @artisan_embroidery, from which I've chosen a few favorites to share with you here.

"A patchwork of the places I have called home. Using fabrics from that time in my life and scaled according to how long I lived there!"

"Binary Beading. For this piece I took my childhood diary entries and translated them into binary code (turning each letter into a string of eight ‘0’s and ‘1’s) and then translated it again into beads, using black and white beads in place of the 0s and 1s. It creates a lovely rippling, weighted feel, quite unlike a piece of embroidery which is virtually weightless."

"'Lockdown Map’ this piece tracks everything I did in 2020. Our area was affected by particularly strict lockdown rules and as a result I did very little. I categorised activities by colour, so shopping, working, exercising, socialising etc are all marked with a different colour thread. The black dot in the centre is home, and each activity is plotted around that according to the geographical location. The stitches are placed according to the direction of travel and the distance from home, with the first circle being in the house and then subsequently moving outwards. For example, pale blue stitches show almost the whole years worth of ‘work’ was done at home with very occasional trips to the office."