Ana Teresa Barboza: Peruvian Textile Artist Use Provocative Embroidery To Describe Human Emotions

 

You haven't ever imagined that a thread can depict a character's internal pain or that a colorful embroidery can be an artistic medium for describing the internal organs of the human body.

From the menstruation of a woman to the melancholy that resides within her or to depict the human-animal relationship: it is  impossible to portray all these expressions through embroidery

One artist to do so is Peru-based textile artist Ana Teresa Barboza, her three-dimensional work often spills out from the confines of the embroidery hoop or canvas she’s working on, illustrating the sprawling growth of the organic and painful subjects.

Ana Teresa Barboza creates poignant vignettes using an unlikely combination of thread, photo transfer and graphite on canvas. Focusing on isolated, nude subjects, Barboza uses the embroidery aspect of her work to describe the characters’ inner pain.

They pull on the threads, exposing their internal organs with contemplative gazes. The embroidered entrails create rich patterns that complement the baroque flourishes Barboza uses for her backgrounds.

With a particular affinity towards the human form, Ana Teresa Barboza imagines situations in which people are forced to reevaluate their bodies.

Ana Teresa, a graduate from Faculty of Art at Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, is fiber artist from Lima, Peru and is one of the top contemporary artists who consistently and prolifically work with embroidery as one of her main choices of medium. Her imagery often depicts the human – usually female – body in an array of situations ranging from animalistic connections with nature to intimate images of self-stitching women. The concept behind her work generally centers around the affects of relationships on human behavior and empathetically depicts their inner pain.

Ana said: "I’m interested in the different concepts one can arrive at by using clothing and embroidery as an artistic medium. An important part of my work revolves around the human body; specially a woman. At first, I used needlework and embroidery to fragment, recompose and decorate the human body. I worked with self-portraits; photographs printed on fabric that were later intervened with embroidery and decorative patterns that served as camouflage."

Barboza’s work makes us deeply aware of the internality/externality of our bodies and the primality with which they exist in relation to others. Nevertheless, the use of embroidery keeps otherwise dark depictions lighthearted.

The work of Spanish artist Ana Teresa Barboza is not what people would expect when it comes to the medium of embroidery. Racy, provocative and somewhat controversial, the mixed media images are definitely not something one's grandmother would fashion. Inappropriate for children as well, Ana Teresa Barboza depicts women tugging at their exposed organs; wher animals getting a little too close to humans and other surreal scenarios.

"My favorite pieces are of a woman stitching decorative embellishments into herself. The woman’s efforts echo the social pressures felt by every woman to maintain her beauty artificially by compulsively covering her “flaws”. This beautiful self-manipulation becomes a painful method to hide a deeper internal pain."-  Teresa, when describing her art making process, explains that the decorative embellishments “Serve as Camouflage”.

A piece of Teresa's work is the image of a woman who is intensely focused on pulling these brightly colored feathers from her body as if narrating her own pain of menstruation, which will definitely freeze you

You will be stunned by Anna's evocative imagination, her work engages the multiple senses from the texture of the embroidery fibers to the vivid choice of color and thought provoking imagery.

Her first collection “Animales Familiares” (Familiar Animals) is structured around a human body, cut, reconstructed and embellished through the intervention of stitching and embroidery. Upon seeing her work, it is difficult to distinguish the boundaries between the human and the animal: both appearing to be as much bestial as fragile.

"In my second exposition, Animales Familiares, I continued working with the relationships we establish in daily life by way of representations of animals and men that adopt unexpected behaviors and perspectives during situations of affection and aggression. In these pieces, the animalistic pathos is controlled by embroidery. These “wild animals” are made more familiar and are domesticated by the embroidery in which they are framed. By using embroidery, which is a traditionally feminine language, the images acquire new meaning as they produce a marked dissonance between image and technique.”- Ana said.

Ana Teresa Barboza techniques, such as mixing tissue with embroidery or drawing with embroidery or photography are what makes the works so alluring. For this, she uses all kinds of yarns that include fabrics, animal, synthetic, threads, wool, and vegetable fibers.

Sometimes she delicately morphs human and animal characteristics seamlessly together as if they are one and then sometimes she arranges both the human and animal characters into intimate and intense compositions. Both compositional arrangements allure to the varying perspectives of and responses to relationships.

There’s very little information about Ana Teresa Barboza on the Internet except that the artist was born in 1981 in Lima, Peru and  developed a signature style that incorporates traditional textile techniques including embroidery, patchwork, knitting and weaving with digital photography into works that exist in the space between tapestry and sculpture.

Some of her work deals with the same idea that consists of imagining the skin as a cloth and/or a blanket that needs to be adorned. This seems to be the message the artist wants to broadcast in this slightly “tortured” collection.

Has Ana Teresa been a victim of the proverb “one must suffer to be beautiful” (“No pain, no gain”)?

Ana Teresa Barboza collections can be seen in many individual expositions and collective exhibitions. Barboza also designs clothing and accessories for many companies. She is also a recipient of many awards and honors.

Take a look at some of her work below:

By the use of embroidery and knitting in her work Ana Teresa Barboza yearns to create a parallel between the process of manual crafts and creating and natures process.

Each of Ana's artworks will leave you stunned and amazed....