How Can Portraiture, Produced Via Industrial Digital Embroidery Processes, Connect Me to My Ancestral Textile Heritage?

Autoethnographic reflective research methodologies are used to explore the self and ancestral textile heritage, through the modes of self-portraiture and industrial digital embroidery processes. The research project is a practice-led, process-driven study of ancestry, textile production, technology, CAD design, industrial processes and sampling. Furthermore, drawing on the discipline of fine art portraiture has been transferred to textile methods and processes, in a bid to connect myself to personal ancestral industrial textile heritage through perceived shared experiences of making. Through the immersion of the virtual and physical realms of digital embroidery production, I have acquired sensory experiential understandings that directly reference my ancestral industrial textile background, whilst acquiring a new skillset and discipline. Familiar creative practices have been transformed, whereby personal experiences of portrait practice are redefined through embroidery tools, materials and digital machinery and by choosing the medium of digital embroidery to create portraiture, I have straddled both arenas of fine art and contemporary textiles. By performing an object-based study of the Amaya digital embroidery machine, in part for data analysis purposes, a close involvement and engagement with the Amaya and CAD design software, gave rise to the symbiotic relationship, a collaborative working partnership between myself and the Amaya and therefore, this was the most surprising and unexpected outcome of the research project.