Karina Thompson is an art quilter and precision embroiderer based in Birmingham, and making large scale wall pieces. She calls herself a sewing machine junkie: using digital embroidery machines to embellish surfaces, regular sewing machines to piece and join the surfaces into larger blocks; before finally using long-arm machines to quilt the works.
Whilst Karina’s work is often about medical data and how we use technology to observe, understand and communicate with the world around us, her latest series, The Recovery Quilts, uses her own mental health as a metaphor for making.
Karina says, “I see myself essentially a storyteller; sometimes the story is big, like what has caused a terminal illness, and sometimes the story is small, like the tale of a single heartbeat; sometimes the story is just breaking, like how we can now see and adapt our chromosomes, and sometimes the story is old, like a Medieval Leper’s burial. I see myself as a storyteller with threads and fabric as my words.”
Digital technology has changed forever the way we discover, comprehend and create. Karina is intrigued in the way we process and communicate data; the paradox of how essentially important that data may be, yet how intelligible it is to the uninitiated – she often explores this gap in her practice.
