Hand-Stitching Turns Fashion Magazines Into High Art

Kingston University student Inge Jacobsen uses cross-stitch, the very same hobby your grandmother favors, to transform covers and fashion spreads inside magazines into art.

According to her blog, each piece takes over 40 hours to perfect, in a process that’s essentially a high-fashion edition of arts and crafts. She explains more about the process in her artist statement,

I’m particularly interested in exploring the different contexts in which photography can be used. I like to stray from the conventional perceptions of what photography can and can’t be. With the over saturation of images, my practice seeks to intervene in this overwhelming consumption from the mass produced and alter it to create something unique. By using intricate and, at times, painstaking technique such as embroidery, I am disrupting the easy consumption of these images. For example I’m in the process of creating a series made up of covers of Vogue magazine that I cross-stitch into. This process makes the covers very tactile and it creates something that is impossible to reproduce on a large scale because each piece is unique and handmade. I feel I have taken it out of circulation and made it something of my own.