Florals Cross-Stitched onto Stiff Metal Objects

Ya’ll know I love embroi­dery. So, I was total­ly blown away when I saw the work of Lithu­a­t­ian artist Sev­er­i­ja Inči­rauskaitė-Kri­aunevičienė, who takes every­day met­al objects and applies cross-stitch­ing to them. She drills tiny holes in buck­ets, water­ing cans, shov­els, and even car doors, and then uses thread for adorn­ment. Some­times, she adds a lit­tle trompe l’oeil to the mix, stitch­ing cig­a­rette butts on an ash­tray or fruit on a fruit dish.

I real­ly enjoy the jux­ta­po­si­tion of hard and soft mate­ri­als in Sev­er­i­ja’s work. She’s apply­ing a craft to hard, stiff objects in an unex­pect­ed­ly delight­ful way. There is an ele­ment of sur­prise as well as won­der, when you think about how involved her process must be. In an essay about her work, Dr. Jur­gi­ta Ludavičienė wrote the following:

Employ­ing irony, Sev­er­i­ja con­cep­tu­al­ly neu­tral­izes the harm­ful­ness of kitsch’s sweet­ness and sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty. Irony emerges in the process of draw­ing inspi­ra­tion from the post­war Lithuan­ian vil­lage, with which artists have lost con­nec­tion today, or from the des­ti­tute Sovi­et domes­tic envi­ron­ment, which women were try­ing to embell­ish with hand­i­crafts, no mat­ter what kind of absurd forms it would take. The inti­ma­cy of indoors freed from all ten­sions is the essence of cozi­ness, that is crys­tal­lized in Severija’s works as cross stitch embroi­dery on var­i­ous house­hold uten­sils not intend­ed for it.

Via Colos­sal. See more of her work!