This is a special post where I will include my embroidery work. This time is in English to show everyone what I do apart from writing: embroidery and weaving. Hope you like it.
To start experimenting with color and filling pieces I chose a typical image that we easily recognize: the heart, which we commonly associate with love or emotions, and let me add to it: blood, and therefore life.
A heart pierced by a blade or an arrow comes to our mind every time we want to express some kind of feeling related to love (romantic), right? But that image construction is as old as the beginning of human civilization, when someone dictated that love and romantic passion were located in the heart.
But it’s not romantic love the essence of the symbolic hearts I stitched.
The origin of my series of hand embroidered hearts is in the Cardiomorphosis: an old fashioned symbolic image of the catholic iconography that the Mexican culture absorbed and perpetuated in what we all know as the «milagritos» (tiny miracles).
The last ones were my primary visual reference, before finding where they come from: the already mentioned Cardiomorphosis. As an example of this is the Sacred Heart of Jesus (or Mary’s), I’m sure you know which one I am talking about.
The word «Cardiomorphosis» literally means the transformation of the heart, of the inner self, the soul. And I love the symbolization of this concept in such a fleshly way: through the human anatomy of the heart.
I can´t help but find a pagan paradox in this (beyond the actual reference that the catholic culture took from the pagan symbolism of the «heart»), where the spiritual connotation is taught by the matter realm: a heart dripping blood! And this is hardcore.
So this was how some catholic influences started to inspire conversion and spiritual growth in Baroque times. A sinning heart, full of mundane temptations; a penitent heart, that recognize its faults; a pure heart full of grace; etc,etc, etc.
Exempt from this catholic definition but full of the spiritual intention and visual reference, these are my particular cardiomorphosis, which I hand made in diferent stages of my ordinary life:
Incendium:
A heart turned on. Made with passion and inspiration.
Dolorante:
A wounded heart. Made with pain and anger.
Vigilans:
A thoughtful heart. Made with hope and patience.
Look inside yourself and find what your heart is full of, and what you need to fill in it to be the best of you. Bless.