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2018
Artwork details
Price
$6,200
About the work
Embroidering Fire Hanabi, or “fire flowers,” is the Japanese word for fireworks and gives its title to this collection of tapestries. Using the punch needle technique, I recreate glows, brocades, chrysanthemums, and willows inspired by Japanese pyrotechnics. In 1877, Jinta Hirayama founded The Hirayama Fireworks Company, revolutionizing the design of fireworks that he exported to Europe and America. His illustrated catalog of 1883 served as inspiration for the Hanabi series, which also enters into dialogue with one of the earliest representations of fireworks in Europe, thus expanding the connection between tradition and visual interpretation across different cultures. The exhibition includes tapestries based on characteristic Japanese daytime and nighttime fireworks, which filled the sky with floating shapes, sparklers, streamers, and colors. This series was exhibited at the Museo Franz Mayer, one of the most emblematic cultural institutions in Mexico City. The Hanabi series establishes a dialogue with the museum’s permanent exhibition, creating connections between textile tradition and its exploration of ornament, color, and the representation of movement. The embroideries tell stories through threads, textures, and symbols with which I reinterpret textile tradition from a contemporary perspective. The works bring to the museum’s galleries a new way of experiencing light and color through textiles, establishing parallels between the punch needle technique and the detail of the historical pieces on display. By being placed alongside objects from different eras and origins.
The Artist
MX
Marta Moreno (@moremorestudio) Úbeda (Andalusia, Spain)textile artist and art director. Marta Moreno finds in embroidery her primary means of artistic expression, a technique she discovered in childhood as a playful activity, challenging gender stereotypes. For her, embroidery is not exclusively feminine, but rather a creative tool with which she imbues her works with volume and texture, using threads as if they were brushstrokes. Although she began embroidering with an artistic focus in 2020, transforming this technique into an art form was, for her, an act of empowerment. The tactile and the visual intertwine to generate compositions with a strong organic feel. Her work is nourished by the observation of natural patterns, biological textures, and structures in transformation, which she reinterprets through thread and needle. Moreno's creative process involves an intimate connection with the materials, allowing her to transform the subtlety of embroidery into a manifestation of movement and depth. Beyond the technique, her work seeks to open spaces for contemplation and sensory experience, inviting the viewer to discover in each stitch a rhythm, a texture, or a memory. In this sense, embroidery is not only a means of representation, but also an act of resistance and empowerment in an era dominated by the digital and the industrial. Her work invites us to question the boundaries between art, between the ephemeral and the permanent, reminding us of the importance of materiality in the aesthetic experience. She currently resides in Mexico City and is the founder of moremore studio, where she specializes in punch needle and embroidery techniques, creating textile art. Her practice inhabits the intersection of art, design, and sensory narrative. She trained at the Úbeda School of Art and holds a diploma in Interior Design from the European Institute of Design in Madrid, where she has also taught. Her professional experience ranges from design curatorship for events held at Matadero Madrid, one of Europe's largest cultural centers,to Art Direction for audiovisual projects for major brands. Marta's artistic language is constructed with thread, gesture, and time. Through embroidery, she creates works that explore memory, the body, and the environment as living surfaces for inscription. Selected by artist Tom Such for his international program with Nike, she has been an artist-in-residence at the Spanish-Mexican gallery Proyecto H and has participated in art fairs such as Arte Santander, among others. Her pieces are part of the collections of the Prado Museum in Madrid and the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City, where she recently concluded a solo show from January to May entitled "Embroidering Fire." Her art has also been featured at the Venice Biennale in a project called "The Stranger," alongside artists Esther Moreno and Jimena Estíbaliz. Marta Moreno has also been selected by the prestigious interior design magazine AD as one of its "The Best" for 2024.
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