Bonnie Sennott, A Leaf-Sized Space, 2017, pearl cotton and linen, 10 inches by 10 inches
“Revelry” at the Northampton Center for the Arts opens Friday, April 14, with a reception from 5 to 8 pm during the monthly Arts Night Out. My embroidery shown here, A Leaf-Sized Space, is among the artworks by more than 35 local artists in the show. The exhibit is a fundraiser, with half of all sales going to support the center, located at 33 Hawley in Northampton, Massachusetts.
A Leaf-Sized Space is part of a series of negative space embroideries called “Presence/Absence.” For the project, I used found objects—in this case, an oak leaf picked up during a walk—as a starting point for freeform embroidery exploring the beauty of ordinary, lost, or overlooked objects. I surrounded the leaf with a rich mix of embroidery stitches and spots of fall color as a way of celebrating its brief but beautiful appearance in this world. The stitches hold the leaf aloft and give it—or rather, its absence—a second life.