Self-described “fiber artist” Mana Morimoto doesn’t discriminate when it comes to putting her stitched embroidery on any medium, stitching everything from paintings to posters to anything else that her needlework can adorn. These embroidered old, black-and-white photographs, though, have to be among her finest pieces.
According to the artist, she chose embroidery because she always found stitching and weaving therapeutic. She coupled this love for embroidery with a fondness for geometric shapes, resulting in an ever-growing collection of photographs hand-stitched with laser-like elements shooting out of people’s eyes and unnatural geometric objects integrated into various scenes. Seriously, it’s like watching stills from a superhero movie set in an older period.
Morimoto starts each of the pieces by finding a suitable photograph that she can augment, either from Google Images or one of her friends’ Facebook profiles. She then prints out the images in black and white (which she prefers because of its more dramatic contrast with colored threads), before proceeding with her erstwhile traditional needlework process. Once a piece is done, its cycle is completed by being digitally scanned and uploaded to the artist’s frequently-updated Tumblr blog.
More than an outlet for her creativity, Morimoto says she values her art’s therapeutic quality above everything else. In her words, stitching and weaving simply makes her feel better.
You can check out more of Morimoto’s work from the artist’s Tumblr. If you want to own prints of her creations, you can purchase them via Society6.
