I first stumbled across Sally Hewett’s work when a friend tagged me in one of her Instagram posts. At first, I didn't know what I was looking at. The photo almost looked Photoshopped, as if a hyper-realistic, disembodied set of lips had been made to look like it was protruding from an embroidery hoop. When I scrolled through the rest of Hewett's feed, it became clear that the initial image I'd seen was no Photoshop job — she's just that good at what she does.
Hewett works with embroidery hoops, thread, Lycra, padding, and other materials to create hyper-realistic sculptures (for lack of a better word) of body parts. I reached out to her to learn about her artistic process, her love of the human form, and why she's drawn to body parts that society often denigrates but that she believes should be celebrated.
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When did you get started as an artist?
I started a part-time B.A. in Fine Art in 1998, graduated in 2003, and have been making things and exhibiting ever since.
Has stitching and embroidery always been your medium, or did you start with something else? What draws you to embroidery thread and fabric?
No, it hasn’t always been my medium. I think of myself as a sculptor, really, and I’ve worked with all sorts of different media, including stone, wood, plaster, fiberglass, metal, papier-maché, found objects, and more. I started working with fabric and stitching during the second part of my degree. This early work was quite abstract — I began using fabrics like lycra stretched over objects either as 3D pieces or as wall hung pieces.
The first body part piece came about purely by chance. I was embroidering a flower, and as I stitched a little group of pinkish French knots for the center of the flower, they suddenly turned into a nipple. The embroidery hoop surrounding it became like a breast. I loved the disjunction between the materials and the subject matter and decided at that moment that I should develop this idea.
I have always sewn and stitched — I used to make most of my own clothes. My mum was a stitcher and my granny and aunty were professional stitchers. It was my granny who first taught me to sew and to embroider. When we were children, she made my sister and me exquisitely made dolls' clothes, some of which I still have. So I was probably drawn to embroidery, thread, and fabric because it’s in my DNA, but it was that little chance encounter with the French knot nipple that meant I used what had up to then been a practical skill as a means of making art.
Your work is so realistic, and you also represent a diverse range of bodies in your work. Can you speak a bit to the importance of that?
I’m interested in how we see things and how we interpret what we see. Why are some bodies or bodily characteristics seen as beautiful and others as ugly? For some artists their love might be landscapes, nature, faces, buildings, etc., but for me it’s always been bodies.
And I have always found unconventional and unusual bodies and faces more interesting and possibly more attractive than those bodies and faces which conform to the generally accepted notion of what is beautiful. So although my first piece was a pretty little nipple, I wanted to use embroidery and stitch to put into question conventional notions of what is beautiful and also to disrupt people’s expectations of embroidery. Embroidery and stitch have a long and complex social and political history and as such they have very many associations and connotations which I wanted to attach to my work.
Over the time I’ve been making these pieces they have become more and more three-dimensional and probably more and more realistic. I’m obsessive about them being beautifully made. I think they have more impact if they are beautifully made and beautifully stitched — the disjunction between the subject matter and the medium is then more powerful, I think.
What’s your favorite piece you’ve done and why?
My favorite piece is probably "Ectomy." It’s a very simple piece and I like that. I made it as a tribute to my granny, who had a mastectomy, and who was both extremely grateful to the surgeon for having saved her life but also delighted with his incredible stitching skills — she was very proud of her scar.
Courtesy Sally Hewett
It is also the piece that has evoked the most response from the public — I've received responses as diverse as extreme anger that I, as a woman who has not had a mastectomy, should put this piece on public display; genuine gratitude that I was showing something which is sometimes kept hidden; tears wept on my shoulder; smiles; and everything in between.
Has your feeling toward your own body changed since you’ve started working with bodies in this way and seeing them as art?
I have to confess probably not very much. I still have the same insecurities I’ve always had! But the older I get and the more imperfect my body becomes, the less I fret about it, ironically!
A lot of your work showcases “imperfect” bodies, or bodies that are “under construction,” so to speak — bodies in which your stitches are representative of medical stitches. Can you speak to what you’re trying to say with those pieces?
I’m interested in how bodies change over time, how they lay down fat reserves, how they show their history in the form of scars, stretch marks, liver spots, wrinkled skin, drooping breasts, etc... I think of the body as documentary — a documentary of the things that this body has experienced over time.
But the body is also changed by disease and the treatment of disease — both medical and surgical. These changes might not be desired in themselves — they can be disfiguring — but they are often the result of life-saving interventions and as such might be a cause for celebration. And then there is elective plastic surgery where you decide to change your body in order to look the way you want to — you decide exactly how it is you want your body to be changed. I think of this as the body as a novel — the story the body tells has been changed according to a desired outcome rather than as a result of chance, time, or disease.
Is there anything else you’d like people to know about your work?
Yes — just a little thing. Although they might not be visible, I always include threads or fabrics inherited from my grandmother in my pieces. She was my teacher and I do this partly to remember her and to acknowledge her contribution to what I do. I’m not sure what she would think of my work — she died long before I started making these things — but I hope she would approve of the way I make them.
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