Joetta Maue: From conception to creation

A photo allows us to capture a moment that would otherwise be lost, and fabric and thread can offer a tactile way of preserving that moment as textile art.

Joetta Maue, who originally trained as a photographer, snapped a quick image of her young children sleeping. Then she introduced this under-exposed image to her treasured collection of old domestic linens – a pillowcase presented itself. That pillowcase, with its stains and rough edges, gave the perfect platform to the image. Using a projector, Joetta transferred the image, preserving the outlines using a simple couched stitch. Left un-ironed, the wrinkles add to the intimacy and autobiography of the piece.

Exploring themes of intimacy, the landscape of the domestic space and the evidence of our daily lives, Joetta makes stitched drawings and take photographs to form the body of her work.

Joetta describes her slow and intuitive practice, her visual influences, and how she choose the threads, colours and stitches that lead to her emotive embroideries, with a focus on her work made in 2020, In Bed, My Loves.

Intimacy & light

How did the idea for the piece come about?

Joetta Maue: Most of my work just arrives to me, either through a photograph that I take or an image appearing in my head.

This work was made for a solo show at Harvard University. I felt that the exhibition, Evidence of Us, an exhibit of drawings, photographs and embroidered works, needed one more embroidery piece to add some balance between the three different mediums. As I considered what that embroidery might be, this particular image kept coming back to me.

The source image was a very under-exposed iPhone photo that I took of my children sleeping. The visual balance of their bodies and their curving towards one another called to me as a portrait of their intimacy.

Often my drawings with thread come from photographs that have something really lovely in the composition and are moment-captured, but do not have the right light or contrast to work effectively as a photographic print. Once I had committed to the image the challenge was to figure out how I would execute it.

What research did you do first?

My work always comes from an intuitive studio practice and takes inspiration from my daily life. As a result, my research consists of thinking about more general ideas and themes, such as intimacy, light and autobiography. This is often in the form of studying poets, writers, artists and philosophers that explore similar themes.

Technically speaking, I like to push my work further in some way. And this development of work is always done through experimentation and play in my studio with my materials and tools.

Let the linen speak

Was there any other preparatory work?

Since my work is so time consuming, I do very little prep work as I want to just get on with the real thing. With that said, often new shifts in my larger works have been influenced by my small works, where I can be more experimental, or samplers that I make while teaching. These samplers and small works force me to get out of my studio patterns and habits and try new things.

In Bed, My Loves… was the first large piece that I made using the couching stitch. This stitch has now become the key technique I teach my students, due to its flexibility and ability to follow a highly nuanced line. Its gestural quality is why I chose it for this piece and it was definitely influenced by my teaching.

What materials did you use in the work?

My materials come to me in many different ways. For textiles, I have a large collection of old domestic linens. These linens have been directly purchased, gifted, found on the road, dropped off my strangers or left for me in schools by past students.

I need the linen to converse with the image I’m using, in order for the work to feel ready to be made. Sometimes it can be a challenge to find that relationship.

This work was particularly tricky. The image is mostly composed as a square, therefore I needed a linen that was somewhat square, to keep the same balance of the composition that drew me to the image in the first place. However, most square linens are kitchen linens, tablecloths or curtains and because this photo was taken in a bedroom, I wanted the linen I used to connect with space.

The pillowcase that I eventually selected felt like the right canvas. It was stained, which referenced the raw intimacy of family, children and sibling-hood. The embroidered design was unfinished, which resonated with the early stage of the relationship between my young children. The embroidered design is two deers together, which seemed the perfect motif connecting with the innocence of childhood.

The problem was that a pillowcase is clearly a rectangle! In the end I cut the pillowcase open and created a square shape.

The thread I used was purchased specifically for the piece – I had decided I wanted the outcome to be very soft and muted, taking inspiration from the under-exposed light of the photo. As a result, I did not want to use DMC stranded embroidery floss, with its slight sheen, which I most often use in my work. I found a linen yarn at a speciality shop and really liked the colour palette. However, the yarn was much too thick for my work so I unravelled it by hand to create a much finer thread.

Gestural & expressive couching

Take us through how you started to create the piece…

Once I had found the linen and my image, I had to transfer the image onto the linen, which I do using projection.

The composition often takes a bit of time as I am really interested in the balance of space. I think a lot about how the white space of a piece exists and the edges of the image. Being a trained photographer, I tend to crop differently than artists working as painters or in more traditional mediums.

Tell us more about how you transferred the image…

To mark the outlines on the linen, I drew the image from the projection using a water soluble marker. I have markers with thick or thin tips to help capture the details as well as the long, gestural lines. This drawing can take an hour or two – I take my time to really capture the shapes of the subject and the sense of light.

In this particular image the light was very dark so the contours and shadows were very soft. I wanted to capture that in the drawing, and as a result the drawing was much more loose than most of my work.

Next, I decided on the thread type, colour and stitch. I unravelled the linen yarn I had sourced, to create a finer line. I wanted the drawing to be subdued in tone but not entirely monochromatic. I chose a palette of blue-greys and purple-greys.

The gestural quality of the drawing did not lend itself to the vocabulary of stitches that I’d been relying on previously. And I was concerned that, since the thread was thicker, some stitch choices would not work. I settled on the couching stitch due to its expressive qualities, which would help me achieve the effect I was looking for.

I also chose to leave the ripped raw edge of the pillowcase unfinished; there was something more open in the work with it this way. I really wanted the work to feel light and relaxed and warm, so I needed to avoid formal choices that might overly contain the work.

Once all these decisions are made, I stitch. I work intuitively deciding on thread count adjustments, line adjustments and drawing shifts. Always referring to the source image but also the emotion the source image captures as well as brings out in me.

Podcasts & poetry

How did you finish and present the work?

While working for hours on the stitching I often listen to podcasts, poetry readings and artist interviews. Occasionally I listen to music, and often I just sit with my thoughts and stitch. Slowly, stitch-by-stitch, the work comes into being.

The work was washed and hung once completed. The wrinkles that formed in its drying added so much visually, including the sense of a rumpled bed, tired bodies, soft breaths and the essence of the children’s skin touching one another, so I decided to leave it un-ironed and in this textured form.

What journey has the piece been on since its creation?

The piece was made primarily in my studio, which is a large open space in a foam factory in Somerville, MA. It travelled with me to one of my winter residencies in Penland in NC and this is where I actually finished the stitching. It became part of my solo exhibition in 2020, which unfortunately was only open for around 10 days before Harvard was shut down due to the pandemic. The work then sat in a silent, quiet and dark space for five months before I was able to retrieve it.

Joetta Maue is based in New England, USA. Her solo exhibition What moves… was held at Arrowmont Gallery, Knoxville, TN (2023) and her was featured in Movements, Emerson Contemporary, Boston, MA and in Shifting Tides, Fort Point Arts at Atlantic Wharf Gallery, Boston, MA.

Joetta’s work has also featured in Fiber Arts Now Magazine and the Surface Design Association Journal. She lectures at Northeastern University, Boston, MA, at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA, Lecturer, and at Lesley University, Cambridge, MA.

Website: joettamaue.com
Instagram: @joettamaue

Joetta Maue delves deep into her intuitive process. What parts of the creation of this work did you connect with most? Let us know in the comments…