Why I Love to Embroider the Heart: A Story of Stitching, Memory & Women’s Resilience
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 and strength, the pulse of women whose stories were never recorded. Every time I stitch a heart onto a historic photograph, I’m giving that woman—real or imagined—her inner life back. I’m stitching visibility, courage, and sometimes even rage onto fabric that once felt silent.
The Heart as Archive
In embroidery, the heart becomes its own kind of archive.
Each filament of red thread becomes a vein, a timeline, a pathway of inherited memory. When I embroider the heart onto early-20th-century portraits, I’m layering personal history over photographic history. I’m asking: What did this woman feel? What was she denied? What did she carry silently in her chest?
My piece of the young woman with dark braids and hollow eyes—where the heart spills downward in tangled red threads—reflects both vulnerability and defiance. The stitched arteries climb up her throat and down her torso, insisting on visibility. Her heart becomes the loudest part of the image.
Embroidery as a Feminist Practice
Heart embroidery is also an act of feminist storytelling. In many cultures, women’s emotions, desires, and bodies were policed or hidden. Embroidery historically was one of the few “acceptable” forms of women’s expression—decorative, domestic, non-threatening.
I reclaim it.
By stitching anatomical hearts—messy, raw, bleeding, alive—I’m reshaping a traditionally feminine craft into a medium of resistance. My textile art speaks to the emotional labor women carry, the lineage of wounds we inherit, and the power we reclaim through creativity.
Threads as Lifelines
There is something uniquely intimate about using thread to form a heart. Every stitch feels like a heartbeat—slow, steady, intentional. This is the rhythm of slow stitching, a practice that keeps me grounded in my own body while honoring the bodies of those in the photographs.
In my piece of the two women standing side by side with machetes, their hearts are connected with a single red thread—a lifeline, a shared story, a bond forged through struggle. The thread becomes a metaphor for sisterhood and survival.
Why I Always Return to the Heart
Because the heart never lies.
Because stitching it feels like writing a secret letter.
Because every heart I embroider is an act of remembrance.
My mixed-media heart embroidery is my way of saying:
Women lived. Women felt. Women fought. Women loved. Women endured.
Embroidering the heart is not only an artistic choice—it’s a form of honoring every woman who was ever told to be quiet, small, obedient, unfeeling. Through needle and thread, I give her heart back to her.