Ghada Amer and the Power of Embroidery
Ghada Amer embroiders images, but her work does much more than that—it forces us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about embroidery. Her work pulls this historically feminine, decorative craft out of the domestic sphere and into the realm of subversion and critique. The delicacy of thread meets the weight of cultural expectation, and in that tension, Amer finds power.
Amer began as a painter, but it was embroidery that allowed her to challenge the traditions she inherited. Stitching onto canvas, she reclaims a medium that has long been coded as passive, turning it into a tool for disruption. Her embroidered paintings often depict female figures tangled in thread that both reveals and obscures their bodies. The act of stitching—a process historically used to reinforce control and precision—becomes something unpredictable in her hands. Threads unravel, loop, and drip, creating images that are neither fully contained nor fully exposed.
The tension in her work is deliberate and challenges the male gaze. The figures she stitches into canvas refuse to be easily absorbed or dismissed. Their presence lingers, layered beneath webs of thread that obscure as much as they define. The result is an uneasy dialogue between desire and erasure, intimacy and censorship.
Embroidery carries an immense cultural weight, tied to ideas of femininity, discipline, and tradition. Amer plays with those associations, turning thread into both a mark-making tool and a conceptual framework. She embraces embroidery’s slowness, its labor-intensive nature, using it as a counterpoint to the rapid consumption of digital and mass-produced imagery.
Her use of text further enhances the narratives in her work. She stitches phrases from religious texts, feminist theory, and popular culture directly into the fabric, creating a layered conversation between word and image. In some pieces, the text blends seamlessly into the composition; in others, it stands apart. The thread—whether forming words or figures—becomes a language of its own, one that resists easy interpretation.
Amer’s embroidery challenges not only artistic conventions but also the hierarchies that have long separated craft from fine art. Historically, embroidery was dismissed as a lesser form, an extension of women’s unpaid labor rather than an intellectual pursuit. Amer’s work disrupts that perception, asserting embroidery as a medium capable of carrying complex, urgent ideas. Essentially, she’s using it to unravel centuries of artistic and cultural bias.
Her influence has been undeniable. By elevating embroidery to the realm of contemporary fine art, she has helped redefine its possibilities, paving the way for new generations of artists who see thread not as a limitation but as a site of radical expression.