Whether it’s a clutch of yellow flowers wrapped around a window in Spain or dozens of pink roses cascading down a house in Switzerland, there’s a note of familiarity that threads through Raquel Rodrigo’s street art.
For much of the past decade, the Spanish artist has been bringing her singular style to cities around the world, hauling a technique that stretches back millennia out of the shadows.
“It’s the embroidery that women have always done inside the home on sheets, towels and cushions,” said Rodrigo. “This is about taking that embroidery to the streets.”
To that end, she meticulously reproduces the hallmarks of the craft – the colourful flowers, rigid lines and raised textures – on a huge scale, affixing the designs to everything from stairwells to storefronts.
The result is a style that seeks to inhabit the hazy space between the public and the private, by thrusting something as intimate as the embroidery of a home into the limelight, said Rodrigo.
The Valencian-born artist came up with the idea in 2011 after she was tasked with embellishing the facade of a Madrid store that offered sewing workshops. As she searched for a way to embody the store’s raison d’être, her mind wandered back to the cross-stitching technique she had learned from her mother as a young girl.
Using a computer to map out the pattern, she designed a flurry of crimson roses tumbling down the facade. From there she printed out a pixelated pattern to follow, stitching it carefully on to a metallic mesh that was mounted on the storefront.
The technique soon became her signature. As her project Arquicostura – a Spanish portmanteau of architecture and sewing – brought her to cities such as London, Istanbul and Philadelphia, reactions poured in from around the world.
Some saw reminders of their childhood in her work, others were flooded with memories of grandmothers and mothers. The constant references to female figures laid bare the wider significance of the work. “Over time I realised that this was a way of asserting a feminine art that has long been invisible,” said the 38-year-old.
The teachings passed down through her family for generations have become the backbone of her workshop in Valencia. Depending on the project, she works with teams of up to 50 people to replicate the intricacies of embroidery on a large scale.
The process is time-consuming; it takes two people up to three days to embroider one sq metre. Among those who help out at times in the workshop is her mother, in a nod to the wisdom handed down decades earlier as she tried to keep her children entertained.
After years spent crisscrossing the globe, Rodrigo has been consistently struck by the ability of her craft to paper over differences. “I was in a village in Russia four years ago and the locals didn’t speak any English, so we couldn’t understand each other.”
Instead, the needlework, stitches and yarn did the heavy lifting, bridging across cultural and linguistic differences. “We found we could work together without having to understand each other.”
When the project came to an end, she was sent off amid tears and hugs. “It was something magical to be able to transmit so much through embroidery,” she said. “It’s really an international language.”