This Artist Embroiders the Bad Girls of Ancient Greece

New York-based artist Elaine Rechek is best known for her takes on the embroidered sampler, which raise issues about the often gendered divide between arts and craft. Her newest collection of works, Minoan Girls, consists of thirteen new pieces and three large tapestries, and is now display at Santa Monica’s Shoshana Wayne Gallery. She’s taken inspiration from Greek Mythology before, most notably in her series Ariadne’s Thread, but here she focuses specifically on the women of Minos because, as she tells The Creators Project, "the Minoan girls are the original bad girls."

Reichek’s 2010 piece Ariadne in Crete is the perfect entrée to the works from Minoan Girls. A piece embroidered in the style of a movie poster, it bears a quote from the philosopher Seneca: “No daughter of Minos has ever got off lightly in love—sin is always attached!” As she helpfully illustrates in a beautifully embroidered Minoan Family Tree, the royal women of Minos where a closely related clan whose lives involved forbidden romance, intrigue, and a disturbing amount of bestiality. The women who form the focus of Minoan Girls are Europa, who was kidnapped by Zeus in the guise of a bull, her daughter-in-law Pasiphae, whom Posiedon made fall in love with another, different bull, and give birth to the murderous half-man, half-bull Minotaur, and Pasiphae’s non-monster daughters, Phaedra and Ariadne, whose illicit ball of thread helped Theseus navigate the Minotaur’s labyrinth.

Through a practice that encompasses hand and digital embroidery, as well as beading, photography, and tapestry, accompanied by texts from the likes of Ovid and Plutarch, Reichek recreates classic works by artists like Titian, Rubens, and Klimt that tell tales of the women of Minos. The mix of new media and old-fashioned embroidery perfectly compliments the content of the works, which, though they draw from ancient sources, tell timeless tales of women breaking the rules.

Minoan Girls is exhibited at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery until July 2nd.

Related:

Intricately Embroidered Self-Portraits Explore Anatomy and Physics

Insta of the Week: Embroidered Tennis Rackets by Fiance_Knowles

Lose Yourself in These Iridescent Embroidered Mandalas