Domrémy. The story of the picture.
This picture is my first commissioned art. I really enjoyed the process! In addition, it’s the whole story behind it.
The text by my client Dr. Doeg (@drdoeg):
Ekaterina Sinchinova is an artist producing real and imaginary landscapes, using novel and state-of-the-art embroidery techniques. Educated at the Krasnoyarsk Art College in Russia, she worked for two decades as a graphic and prepress designer before beginning her formal artistic career in 2021. Kate’s technique is self-taught. She works on linen, sometimes washing it to settle the mesh, and dexterously manipulates the fabric as she embroiders, without use of hoops or frames. Katrin guides threads of various gauges and colors with a long, flexible needle, limiting herself to the straight stitch, the chain stitch, a couple of her own novel stitches, and the French knot. In regions of sky, she can deftly shuttle the softly colored thread as a new horizontal weft worked across the fabric. In the foliage, blossoms and greenery, she uses dense clusters of French knots, constructed at different depths, to create a third dimension for texture and volume. The knotting technique creates zones of overwhelming complexity on the canvas, forcing the viewer’s gaze to be impressionist, romantic, and haunting. While Katrin avoids the mathematical exactitude of cross-stitch, her technical maneuvers bear the precision of chess executed on the cuadricular text-tile.
Her January 2023 piece, titled 'Domrémy', is a deeply layered work relevant to our story. It depicts a well beside a large tree, on a green hillside. In the background stands a small tower with a single window, and above it a sky formed by hues of pink and blue. The tree is identical to the ombú tree along Paseo de las Artesanías, beside Recoleta Cemetery. Native to the Pampas, the species is important for providing shade in the open terrain, serving as a symbol of the River Plate, and the culture of the gauchos. The embroidery has a magical quality of breath, movement, and being alive. Much of the complexity and labor of the work is embedded in the foliage of the tree. The lowest branch of the World Tree is ornamented with a garland woven from yellow and blue flowers. The aperture of the garland lines up with that of the tower window and Urd’s Well, at the bottom of the image, spilling moss into the grass. Those ground stitches, along the base of the landscape, flow into the 32 byte encoding columns of eight binary stitches, each of which we represent below with two hexadecimal numbers. We parse the byte columns using this key table and log the steganographic payload.
| Decimal | Binary | Hexadecimal |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | .... | 0 |
| 1 | ...I | 1 |
| 2 | ..I. | 2 |
| 3 | ..II | 3 |
| 4 | .I.. | 4 |
| 5 | .I.I | 5 |
| 6 | .II. | 6 |
| 7 | .III | 7 |
| 8 | I... | 8 |
| 9 | I..I | 9 |
| 10 | I.I. | A |
| 11 | I.II | B |
| 12 | II.. | C |
| 13 | II.I | D |
| 14 | III. | E |
| 15 | IIII | F |
The 256 bits encode the following hexadecimal string:
6da7a9a9d8d651c48e0a979ea6d1f00ce03cd1388ea390c5fa2050f9b2fb4910
The landmarks depicted in the embroidery no longer exist. They represent the environment in Lorraine, France, on a hill known as Bois-Chenu (Old Oak Woods), where Joan of Arc received divine visions as a young woman. The tower was demolished and the tree was said to be cut down by the Catholic Church in the 17th century due to its association with pagan worship. Now on the site stands the Basilica of Bois-Chenu, built during the final two decades of the 19th century. Inside the Basilica is a seven panel mural, completed in 1913 by Lionel Noel Royer and titled 'Scènes De La Vie De Jeanne D’Arc'. The series details the historical events in the life of Joan of Arc: from receiving the ritual host as a child in Domrémy, to her visions at the Tree of Bourlémont, to her initial meeting with the Dauphin at Vaucouleurs, entering the besieged city of Orléans, leading soldiers to drive the English from the Loire capital, crowning Charles VII at Reims Cathedral, taking sacrament during her captivity at Rouen, and finally her burning at the stake. This chronology of Joan’s life and passion echoes the sequence of the stations of the cross and can aid in telling her story. Katrin’s embroidery behaves differently as a narrative device. The place she imagines in the field of the embroidery manifests over two hundred years, invisible of human actors. The artist’s description of her work tells the history in a similar style. It weaves the story of Joan of Arc around the Bourlémont fairy tree, using contour path inhabited by the children, saints and supernatural forces. The narrative serves as a fiber bundle, gathering various threads, and will inform the choreography of our attention.
Domrémy is a small village in the Champagne region of France which was the birthplace of Joan of Arc (1412-1431). Due to her great importance, the French simply refer to her as la Pucelle (the Maiden), and officially named the town Domrémy-la-Pucelle. Since Joan of Arc was tried for heresy under oath, we know much about her life from her own words, and those of people close to her. Their testimonies were recorded in official Church documents, which still exist today. This embroidery represents the landscape where Joan, starting at the age of 13, received visions of the archangels Michael and Gabriel, and the three virgin martyr saints: Catherine, Barbara and Margaret. In these visions she was instructed to lead the armies of France, drive out the English and crown the Dauphin as King. Testimony reveals the children of Domrémy would sing and dance around the giant beechwood "fairy tree", and leave flower garlands on its branches, as gifts for the fairies. The nearby wellspring was also said to be enchanted. The beechwood was also called the Tree of Bourlémont, named after the family of Joffrey Bourlémont. Joffrey settled the Vosges department of the Champagne region, after returning from the Crusades, nearly 200 years before Joan of Arc. Depicted in the image is Bourlémont tower overlooking the fairy tree, wellspring, and forest reported to be home to dragons. A singular floral wreath is placed on a low-hanging branch of the giant 1000-year-old tree.
— artist’s description of embroidery work 'Domrémy' by Ekaterina Sinchinoca (January 21, 2023)”
