Survey of Assembled Attributes of a Tower Crane, 2019.

Digital sewing machine embroidery: thread on Pelon, paper, acrylic paint, and pins.

This body of work was created for the exhibition “Attribute,” at the University of Hawaii at Manoa Art Gallery in August-October 2019.

“The mark of the hand” is significant in terms of hand-crafted objects made with refined technical skill. No matter how “well” they are made, we can delight in visual indicators of the individual who produced the object.  This concept motivated me to find and identify marks that are intrinsic to the digital embroidery machine. The process revolved around two questions: what is this machine’s essential purpose?, and what are its limitations?

I marvel at the machine’s capacity to infinitely replicate marks with a needle.  Ultimately, the limitation of the embroidery hoop size (4" x 4") determined my process, and I took advantage of this attribute by building images through the tiling of multiple embroideries. The segmentation echoes the way that tower cranes are built from shorter sections on construction sites.

With the machine as my studio assistant, I worked and reworked drawings of construction tower cranes – one mesmerizing machine producing images of another amazing feat of engineering.