Sampling Dürer

These are a series of embroidered details from engravings by Albrecht Dürer. The first is from the famous polyhedron in Melencolia I, the second a section of heraldic mantling, the third zooms in on Adam's chest hair, and the fourth is from the mysterious gourd hanging in St Jerome's study. Renaissance artists often pitted one medium against another. For example, Dürer translated a series of engraved knotwork designs that originated in Leonardo's circle into the medium of woodcut, a print technique that Dürer had pushed to new, virtuosic heights. Achieving the same linear fluency and tonal range in a woodcut as in an engraving is very challenging, demonstrating Dürer's masterful command of the printed line.  By translating Dürer's engravings into the even less fluid (and more 'feminine') medium of embroidery, my little sampler squares explore the boundaries between copying and productive quotation.  On the one hand, the sampled squares record acts of slavish and time-consuming reproduction, but they also reveal entirely new visual worlds within the original prints, like strange, remote patches of land on an OS map.