Gina Kirby
Urban Fabric: Salford
Textiles and embroidery are two of Gina’s passions, with architecture the inspiration for many unique compositions. Her ‘Urban Fabric’ series uses textiles in an imaginative manner, linking soft threads with hard architecture to produce new dimensions to cityscapes and buildings, whilst familiar skylines are given a new twist as their outlines gently weave across fabric.
Gina uses centuries old embroidery techniques and modern technology to create contemporary, new, fresh pieces of art. Her embroideries are created free style on a non-computerised sewing machine allowing the image to organically grow and develop as she sews, with fine details, such as French knots, added later by hand.
Embroidery is an old tradition with a stability of basic embroidery stitches, which has remained for hundreds of years. The emergence of the sewing machine came with the First Industrial Revolution and helped extend and shape the future of textiles and the clothing industry, upon which so much of Salford’s great wealth and history was built.