Mana Morimoto is an embroidery explorer from Tokyo, Japan. She makes the invisible visible by augmenting reality with threads.
When I first discovered Mana’s work in 2013, I was taken with her scanned thread collages – a simple, innovative idea.
“I think it was a few months ago, probably in June when I first tried scanning threads. I’m never good at organizing embroidery floss and my desk was always covered by them and I just loved how they look. They were beautifully tangled up and I wanted to keep them the way they were, but then I needed to clean my desk so that’s when I though of scanning them.
“I just read someone writing about my scanned threads work on their blog and they were saying I’d carefully place embroidery threads or something like that, but I’m never careful when placing threads on my scanner. I just grab threads and then kind of spread them before scanning.
“I could spend a whole day working on these and never get tired. I never know how the final images would look like when I scan threads but they always turn out beautiful I think!”
It was a really clever way to use technology and threads to produce a new genre of embroidered art. Subsequently, Mana has gone on to make thread perform different functions, with a definite emphasis on stitching with photography.
Her particular passion is for exploring the spaces between elements, using thread to illustrate the connections and tensions in a situation. We have seen similar approaches in the work of Melissa Zexter and Stacey Paige where thread creates another narrative layer on an image, and Mana explores this idea with a playful attitude.
From animation to installation, and from private pieces to corporate work, Mana Morimoto continues to take thread to new levels with her artwork and it’s exciting to see.
Mana’s tearing it up on Tumblr and you can follow her on Instagram to see when her new work is launched.
