Betsy Wright's untitled embroidery work

In Betsy Wright’s untitled embroidery work, she embroidered a large face of Marilyn Monroe on a 30’’×30’’ white paper with a single string. This work shows an interest in the value of modern celebrities.

The work consists of very simple lines that only show the basic contour of the face. There is also no shade or any filled color area on the paper, which makes the structure of the face less distinctive for the viewer. However, although the limited use of these lines leads to an emptiness of the vision, a three dimensional visual space for the face is created. This visual space looks very broad and deep because of the raised contour for the face. Those raised curves embroidered on the paper not only split the whole space into different parts, but also unify these parts through making them look like overlapped multiple paper layers. However, this visual effect could become most extraordinary if the contour looks distinctive enough and doesn’t show any ambiguous parts with the high brightness of the white paper. Yet the same white color of both the paper and the string results in a low contrast for the two different materials, which leads to an indiscernible viewing of the work for the highlight part and lowers the success of this visual experiment a little bit.

It is worth nothing that the string on the paper has its own pattern resulted from the process of the embroidery. The contour of the face is constituted by many small regular segments in same length so that a strong visual rhythm is created with the movement of the curves. Such rhythm reveals the artist’s good control of embroidery skill, and visually improves the quality of the work to a higher level. At the same time, the work looks very balanced with its both complexity and simplicity of these segments. That is, Monroe’s hairs, which are more chaotically developed, suggest a certain contrast to the emptiness on her face. With the hairs and the neck perfectly surrounding the face, the work shows a highly balanced visual weight and even becomes more unified with a steady focus on the facial structure.

The theme of this work is could be related to the identity of celebrity. Monroe’s face is quite abstracted and only remains a contour. The viewer may not recognize it as Monroe’s face from a distance. However, the very minute nevus near her mouse makes the face different from any other ordinary face, where the artist even doesn’t have to draw the eyeballs for Monroe. Therefore, the nevus becomes the symbol of Monroe and also suggests a relationship between common people and celebrities. That is, the celebrities must have some special quality or personality that common people don’t have. This distinctive property of modern celebrity defines the borderline between two kinds of people. However, this borderline also shows a certain ambiguity as the differences between common people and celebrities sometimes are too minute to be noticed. Eventually, people will get to know that celebrities are actually the same as common people, while their identities remain different.

Betsy’s embroidery work is a really good example of visual study with new media. At the same time, she also achieved in inviting the viewer to think about the culture of celebrities and their influence on common people.