Anna Torma’s textile art combines personal and formal elements with traditional hand-embroidery and stitching techniques producing complex images deeply rooted in culture and craft.  Through layers of text and image amongst found and fabricated textiles the wall-hangings recall drawing and collage more than conventional embroidery. 

In her recent work Torma has been using collected figurative wall hangings as source material. Customarily found in homes and used in kitchens to preserve the neatness of the cooking area these pieces were made by women using embroidery kits sold en masse at country markets.  The hangings served as decoration as well as a poster for domestic values illustrating moral and religious virtue, wealth, unrequited and happy love.  Torma’s works in the Encyclopaedia Domestica exhibition are based on these accumulated found handworks, which the artist rearranges and organizes to make their naïve universe visible. Using her excellent knowledge of embroidery and craft she transforms old stories into new complex pictographs elaborate in concepts and forms. 

The exhibition also includes a series of older works, pieces from Cambridge Galleries Permanent Collection, and three new works in which Torma transforms heavily worn quilts handmade from WWI soldier’s uniforms with a series of embroidery drawings and text.  Torma’s fascination with textiles comes from, as the artist puts it, “… the material's usefulness, its ability to represent and unite art, culture and history”.

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 2 at 2:30 pm