JACQUELINE STRANO

The heart appears again and again in my work—floating outside the body, stitched back into it, glowing with red thread, beating between women who hold machetes, or blooming from the chest of a young woman in an archival photograph. Many people ask why I embroider the heart so often. The answer lives somewhere between anatomy, emotion, and collective memory. For me, the embroidered heart is a symbol of what survives. It is the organ of truth-telling, the container of grief

Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming Frankenstein has reignited a conversation that has always lived quietly in my work: what does it mean to stitch a body back together? What does it mean to rebuild the self from scraps—memory, trauma, tenderness, and the stories we inherit? Frankenstein’s creature is not simply a monster; he is a being assembled from the remnants of others. And in many ways, so are the women in the historic photographs I embroider. The stitched heart, the exposed arteries, the layered threads—they all