Corinna Wyles-Plumley

Stitched Together

Featuring over 200 hours of hand embroidery work, "Stitched Together" is a book that is one part of my thesis exploration. For my thesis, I chose to explore where ideas come from and the human consciousness. In other projects I looked at it from a scientific and spiritual perspective, and in "Stitched Together," I look at it from a generational and cultural perspective, and how ideas may be passed down through generations and become a bigger part of ourselves. I was inspired by embroidery as a medium to represent the threads of consciousness, and combined it with digital illustrations. I was also inspired by the psychedelic art style of the 60s as it represented the opening and exploration of the conscious mind. The story itself follows a young girl Maria, who is gifted an embroidery hoop that used to be her grandmothers. As she learns to embroider, she discovers that anything that she can image she can bring to life through her embroidery, and uses this to explore many different places and discover incredible things. Through all her adventures though, she realizes it doesn't mean anything without family and that the thing she misses most is just being with her grandmother again, and that the real joy of the embroidery hoop is the connection it forms with her grandmother. The story itself was created because of my own grandmother's passing last year and I wanted to have this as a way to both celebrate and honour how much she meant to me. The book is 20 pages long plus a front and back cover.