Second-Generation Snutki (Polish Spiderweb Embroidery)

Return To The Place You've Never Been

The Polish embroidery technique known as snutki developed in the 18th century as an imitation of costly Italian lace. A labor-intensive, delicate form of cutwork, it was traditionally worked on fine white cotton or linen with white thread. Symmetrical shapes were drawn on tightly stretched cloth and connected by anchored single threads. These shapes, as well as eyelets created with a stiletto, were outlined by precise, close buttonhole or overcast stitches. Finally, the designs were painstakingly cut out to create the lace. Snutki was used to decorate clothing and folk costumes, household items, and linens for churches and manor houses. Women accepted snutki commissions from the wealthy to supplement their incomes; others worked snutki items for the Church in the hope they would be blessed for their labor in this life or the next.

The Sum of Everything You Remember And They Forget

I reinterpret this tradition from the perspective of a second-generation Polish-American who grew up with family in both countries. I can appreciate traditional needlework, especially when it reflects my own heritage, but I cannot imagine myself doing it traditionally. My snutkis are not homages to a romantic past in the Old Country. Instead, I utilize hand-dyed linen and asymmetry to explore origin, memory, loss, and transformation. Solid shapes are tenuously connected across voids by easily severed thread, and I am never sure which is more important, the fabric or the space between. As one moves from one world to another, one life to another, one self to another, what is cut away? What remains? Which part is the truth, and which is only embroidered longing?

First Day In The New World

Repeat The Words You've Never Heard

Remember The Things That Never Happened

These three pieces were part of the Handweavers Guild of America Small Expressions 2011 exhibition at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville. The show's juror was Jeanne Brady, professor and head of the fibers department at Tennessee Tech University's Appalachian Center for Craft. An article about the show appears in the Fall 2011 issue of HGA's Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot magazine.

Patricia Kowalski King receives two purchase awards at Open Space show

 

OPEN SPACE: Art About the Land, Artist Reception at Minnistrista Cultural Center, Muncie, IN, September 11, 2010 -- Patricia Kowalski King received two purchase awards at this annual show to benefit the Red-tail Conservancy. Her piece "A Place That Is Not A Place" (5.5x8", embroidery, yarn hand-dyed by the artist) was purchased by the Anderson (Indiana) Center for the Arts. The Red-tail Conservancy Board of Directors purchased the Russian punchneedle work "I Always Meant To Go Back" (5x5", embroidery, yarn hand-dyed by the artist). Grateful thanks to the Anderson Center for the Arts and to Barry Banks, Red-tail Conservancy executive director.

First Place Winner, HGA’s Small Expressions 2010

This piece, "Cryptic Choices," is the First Place Winner in the Handweaver's Guild of America Small Expressions 2010 Show, an international, juried exhibition which was shown through July 2010 at the Albuquerque (NM) Convention Center. Cotton thread on cotton, Russian punch needle embroidery, yarn hand-dyed by the artist.

"Although tiny in size, this work has a monumental character... (T)he image would suit a wall-sized mural as easily as a work measuring only a few inches. The colored mark-making on a slightly undulating white field brings to mind ancient petroglyphs... The artist has taken some risks with her unconventional composition which succeeds by simultaneously stopping the eye with color contrasts and implying infinite space." - show juror Rebecca A. T. Stevens, Consulting Curator, Contemporary Textiles, at The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.

An in-depth article about the show appears in the Fall 2010 issue of HGA's magazine, Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot.

More about the Small Expressions 2010 Show...