Gordina Journal
Star and House
From Clay to Thread
A fictional tattoo artist prompted a new way of looking at ancient writing. Star and House brings that idea into embroidery, pairing two familiar images in a contemporary design shaped by reading, memory and the places we call home.
The starting point for Star and House was a fictional tattoo artist: the idea of carrying ancient writing on the body. Reading Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky became a route into cuneiform, then into a design for cotton. The connection is personal, made through reading rather than through the discovery of an original textile.
A change of material
Cuneiform’s characteristic wedges were made by pressing a stylus into clay. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s account of early writing traces this material practice.
Embroidery asks for a different kind of mark. A line has thickness; the thread catches light; the fabric moves beneath it. On a T-shirt, the geometry becomes something encountered at close range and worn in ordinary life.
Two points of reference
The name holds two images together: a star overhead and a house below. For Gordina, their pairing suggests distance and shelter, the world beyond us and the place we return to.
This is our interpretation, rather than the translation of an ancient sentence. The design brings the two ideas together in a contemporary composition. Its story follows a simple path: from a book to an interest in a script, and from that interest to thread.
Reading: There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak.
The embroidery today
Embroidered in the Gordina studio in the Netherlands.
Cuneiform-inspired star-and-house motifs embroidered at the chest on black cotton.
