Corinne Kühn

Corinne Kühn is an embroidery artist from Switzerland. You can follow her creative process on Instagram on her account more_than_stitches.

When her first daughter was born, she suddenly had a lot of time on her hands. First she tried water colour painting, but this seemed to be too two dimensional. With her mother and grandmother both seamstresses and inspired by a friend, she tried hand embroidery and later did some machine embroidery too. Then for many years, embroidery took a back seat in her life, until both her daughters were grown up and she started to embroider again. Her first big machine embroidery was an embroidery of three portraits of her younger daughter at three stages in her life. Added were three drawings her daughter made at approximately the same time as the portraits were taken.

„Embroidery fullfills my need for colour and texture. I can’t get enough of different types of fabric and thread and my stash of all kinds of threads is still growing. I love the feel of different types of fabrics and I could drown inrainbows of colour.”

These days, Corinne embroiders mostly by hand. She focuses on landscapes and plants. Besides these works, she takes commissions for portraits. „Portraits are landscapes too, which tell of moments in time, of a life lived.“

Asked about her creative process, she answers: „There are landscapes or plants, which just speak to me. There is something I can’t name that calls to be stitched. I feel the same with people. There are faces, which just call to be stitched. This can be a newborn or a person who has lived a full life.”

“The first part of every new project is always a photo”, Corinne continues. “For landscapes or plants I then make a rudimentary sketch and select lots of fabrics and threads. Even though I’ll only use a small part of it in the final piece, the selection helps me to decide how to proceed. For a portrait commission, I sketch every line and shadow of the face, before I start stitching. I only use black cotton or silk thread, so that the final embroidery resembles a sketch still.“