Space Vs Vanity: Anna Hunt’s Arty (and Fashionable) Embroideries |

In yesterday's post we visited space and the future, via fashion and a dystopian film, so let's continue the thread by very briefly looking at a work of art that reunites themes such as space and death and employs a technique borrowed from the world of crafts.

The work in question is "Vanitas" (2004) by Anna Hunt (part of the Paisley Museum collection): this piece shows on one side the Sputnik and on the other a skull, hinting at man's mortality. The artist created in this way a sort of juxtaposition of images, a subversive hybrid: Vanitas means in Latin “vanity” and refers to paintings – mainly still life ones – symbolising the transience of earthly pleasures and achievements. Hunt reminds us therefore about the limits of human endeavours by placing a skull, a memento mori symbol next to a modern machine like the Sputnik.

Despite Hunt using in her works embroidery as the main medium to recreate photographic images – her artworks featuring iconic architectures and buildings in six-by-eight inch satin-stitch embroideries, but also her series about the history of flight are well-known – she never considered herself an artisan but an artist.

You may argue that the precise details she employed for this work could make Hunt's thread on canvas works easily conceived as high fashion pieces as well (you could somehow imagine Prada stealing Hunt's idea of architectural embroideries in striking colours and details and maybe launching its own Rem Koolhaas/OMA buildings embroidered line…). Yet this work has also got an important message that could be applied to fashion: the glamorous pleasures of life are abruptly wiped out by death, so it wouldn't be a bad idea if, every now and then, the fashion industry and the many people connected to it would maybe take themselves less seriously…