Meet Your Maker 008: 1831 Embroidery

From a studio in Deptford, Gabriel runs 1831 Embroidery, working across artist merchandise, independent brands, film productions and one-off commissions. He has been working with digital embroidery for eight years and based in Deptford for five, gradually growing the studio from one machine to three.

The work can shift quickly. One day might involve producing a run of caps or T-shirts; another could mean creating a giant embroidered label for a shop-window display or a set of fictional police patches for a film. Some projects are designed to be reproduced in their hundreds, while others exist only once.

That balance between repetition and one-off production sits at the centre of Gabriel’s practice. A finished file can be sewn again and again, but getting to that point involves far more interpretation than the apparent automation of the machine might suggest.

A client will usually arrive with an image and an idea of what they want it to become. Before anything can be sewn, the artwork has to be translated into a set of instructions the embroidery machine can understand. Stitch direction, density, underlay and compensation all change depending on the design and the material beneath it.

A thicker fabric might require additional compensation as the stitches are pulled into its surface, while a lighter material may need to be stabilised before the visible layer of thread is applied. Sampling allows those decisions to be tested and refined before the final piece is produced.

For Gabriel, this digitising stage is where much of the authorship lies. Rather than sending artwork elsewhere to be converted into a machine file, he learned the software himself, allowing him to control how each image is interpreted.

“I’m making choices that maybe someone else who did the same file wouldn’t do. Things like adjusting the density of big areas of colour. It’s a sculpture in the end. Sometimes you’re turning a 2D image into a 3D image, and so there are choices in those steps.”

Those choices can be almost imperceptible when the embroidery is working well. A line in a flat drawing may need to pass beneath another line in thread. The hair on a figure must visibly sit above what is behind it. Details that are understood instinctively in a printed image have to be consciously reconstructed once the image becomes a layered, physical surface.

The aim is not to reproduce the artwork exactly. Some information has to be removed, exaggerated or rearranged so that it continues to read correctly in thread.

“The image is not printing out. The image you give me, I will abstract out, and then we’re reforming it so that people see your 2D image when they look at it. It’s a strange idea, but when you’re studying this all the time, that’s what you end up realising.”

A pencil drawing, for example, may contain areas of fine hatching that would become too dense if translated stitch for stitch. The challenge is to find another way of retaining the roughness and character of the mark without overwhelming the fabric.

When that translation works, the distinction between commercial product and individual artwork starts to blur. A design might be reproduced across fifty T-shirts, but each piece still carries the technical and creative decisions made while constructing the original embroidery file. 

A physical build-up of colour

Unlike a digital or screen-printed image, embroidery does not sit flat against a surface. Thread has thickness, direction and reflectivity. It catches light differently depending on the angle of the stitches, while the colour itself is limited by the physical thread available.

“A thread has to be the colour it is. A Pantone can only match closer, so it won’t match exactly.”

That material quality also means embroidery carries its own kind of imperfection.

“You do get a degree of forgiveness because it is a physical medium, and I think people do understand it. It’s not a perfect thing. With embroidery, you’re giving me an inspiration to make a piece at the other end. It isn’t going to be a flat image. That’s impossible. Something is lost in that translation.”

What is lost can also make the finished object more recognisably embroidered. Gabriel points to the visual language of vintage embroidered clothing: large scenes built from solid areas of thread, where the construction of the image remains visible rather than being disguised.

“I think people want it to look like that ’90s ducks-over-a-pond, Lake Michigan jumper that they saw in a second-hand shop. That’s what they want. And that was a build-up of colour. Embroidery is a certain physical build-up of colour. That’s how it links in your mind.”

Attempts to make embroidery behave more like photographic printing can remove the quality people respond to in the first place. For Gabriel, the gaps, layers and distinct blocks of colour are not technical limitations to be hidden. They are part of what gives the medium its character.

Found images and forgotten print

Alongside the technical process, found imagery forms an important part of Gabriel’s practice. He searches through old magazines, labels, tickets and other pieces of printed ephemera, looking for illustrations and small graphic details that have slipped out of circulation.

These images were not always intended to be treated as important pieces of design. They might have appeared on the back of a magazine, on a transport ticket or in a short-lived piece of promotional material. Their original purpose may have disappeared, but the drawings remain.

“There’s little characters on tickets from metros in cities you’ve never heard of that have got a nice feel to them. I don’t know what the circulation of that magazine was. It might have had a subscription base of a hundred thousand people in New York and the outer areas. But there’s drawings in there that don’t exist anywhere else.”

For the Blacksmith Labour Jacket, Gabriel selected an illustration from the back cover of an American short-fiction magazine dating from around the 1930s. The magazines covered subjects including science fiction, sport and romance, with stories often accompanied by black-and-white, Americana-style drawings.

Gabriel describes the chosen image as slightly “Jetsons-esque”, an overlooked retro-futurist illustration discovered while searching through old print.

This interest in found imagery is not simply nostalgia. Gabriel sees everyday printed material as a record of the people, industries and design decisions that produced it. Membership cards, programmes, tickets and packaging created spaces for illustration, lettering, layout and portraiture, even when their primary purpose was entirely practical.

“When we were creating ephemera, you’re still creating a history. And on digital it’s just here today, gone tomorrow.”

He points to the disappearance of the football matchday programme as one small example.

“That was a whole opportunity for design and layout and typography. That’s just gone.”

As more everyday objects move onto screens, the opportunities to make and later rediscover this kind of unassuming visual culture become fewer. Printed ephemera survives almost accidentally: a membership card preserves a portrait; an old magazine holds a drawing that appears nowhere else; a ticket carries a character designed for a transport network in a city far away.

“There’s so much, it’s really fun to find and look through. I try and bring some fun ones up and try and meld stuff together. There’s a big world to go through still.”

By searching through that material and rebuilding selected images in thread, Gabriel gives them another physical life. The process brings together the two sides of 1831 Embroidery: a detailed understanding of how images are constructed, and an instinct for the strange, overlooked graphics worth constructing again.