Tools for Freedom: Audrey Demarre in Conversation with Marcella Echavarria
Audrey Demarre is a French embroiderer, curator, and writer whose poetic approach to text and textile invites a radical slowness in how we view memory, identity, and feminine craft. Her debut book, Broderies, explores the intimate and emotional power of contemporary embroidery through the work of women artists who use thread not just as decoration, but as a way to speak, resist, and heal. Informed by her own lineage – her great-grandmother was a seamstress in Lille – Demarre’s work bridges generations and geographies with a needle and a story.
Broderies, by Audrey Demarre.
Embroidery found Demarre unexpectedly. While working as an illustrator for magazines, she began stitching a silhouette with black thread, drawn more by instinct than design. That moment marked a shift. It offered her a quiet, intimate space – one that lay between drawing and writing and soon became her personal sanctuary.
Only later did she recognise the familial thread in her practice. Her great-grandmother, Irma, was a seamstress, witty, tall, and independent. Demarre carries her name, and she believes that something of her spirit is in her hands. The feeling she experiences while stitching a kind of certainty and peace, became a link to this lineage.
The book Broderies was curated through intuition, not theory. Demarre followed pieces that whispered rather than shouted – works marked by memory, stillness, and emotional residue. These were not traditional artworks, but deeply lived experiences stitched into form. What moved her most were artists who came to embroidery not by training but through detour – as a way of healing, remembering, or simply being.
Film still from: Audrey Demarre - Brodeuse, by Antoine Sorel
In an interview for Selvedge, Marcella Echavarria speaks to Audrey Demarre about her own embroidery journey, and what inspired her new publication:
Marcella Echavarria: You describe embroidery as “a thread that found you almost by accident.” Can you tell us more about that first stitched silhouette on paper – and what prevented you from letting go of the needle afterwards?
Audrey Demarre: I was doing illustrations for magazines then, and truthfully, I wasn’t very happy with what I was producing. It felt not quite right. Then one day, I had an article that I had to do about Ines de la Fressange, and I took a sheet of paper and a strand of black thread and began to draw with it, just intuitively, this elongated figure that I was seeing. What emerged surprised me. I wasn’t a trained embroiderer, nor did I feel like a true illustrator, but suddenly, I had found this little space in-between, a quiet place of my own. No one was looking for me, and I wasn’t trying to be anyone else. It was my little corner of the world.
ME: In your introduction, you speak of a lineage of women – your mother, your great-grandmother Irma – who used the needle out of necessity or love. How did that silent inheritance shape your relationship with thread and story?
AD: That awareness came later, almost like an afterthought. I never consciously connected my embroidery to my family’s history until I realised how at peace I felt while stitching – so decisive, so sure of myself, a rare feeling. Then I looked at my name – Audrey Cécile Corentine Irma. These were the names of my grandmothers and great-grandmother. I carry them with me. My great-grandmother, Irma, sewed and embroidered; she was witty, independent, full of life, and super tall. She worked at the Belle Époque in the 1920s from Lille, a place with a great textile history. I like to think that something of her remains in my hands. My mother once told me, “She waited for you.” She babysat me, and that is when she passed something on the spell of the thread. I never doubted the embroidery. I never know what I am going to do. There is a space that calls me because it needs some blue, and I just start.
Extract from Broderies by Audrey Demarre.
ME: How did you choose the artists featured in your book Broderies? Was it instinct, theme, or thread?
AD: It was very intuitive, almost like following a scent trail. I didn’t start with a checklist or categories. I simply followed the works that moved me, those that I loved – works that lingered. Some I had seen in exhibitions or on social media. Others came through word of mouth. But the guiding principle was always a kind of quiet power. I wanted works that whispered rather than shouted, that held space for stillness and memory.
I followed the embroidery and how it calls for certain themes, like anatomy, flowers and trees, memories and stories. For anatomy, I analysed why the thread fits so perfectly, because the needle can go in and out of the body; it is also a tool that repairs, and this fascinated me. Embroidery is a great tool for talking about what we have inside. A needle can go deep inside; it can hurt, but it can also repair.
ME: You often mention being drawn to self-taught artists or who arrived at embroidery through detours. What is it about these paths off the beaten stitch that speaks to you?
AD: There’s a freedom in the detour. When rules or expectations do not weigh you down, the gesture becomes more honest. Many of these artists discovered embroidery not as a goal but as a means – a way to heal, remember, and slow down. Their work isn’t trying to be anything but itself, making it incredibly powerful. It feels lived-in, like a second skin.
Embroidery is also very democratic and free: it can be done anywhere with very few tools and does not need a lot of space. It is light and easy, and it is not fragile. It is whatever you want. I realised that I always search for freedom in my path. I also like that there is a history behind it: women doing masterpieces and never signing them, women building worlds and languages, passing the thread from one hand to another. Embroidery was an easy way to keep them home and quiet. Embroidery is about womanhood: my mother, my grandmothers. I keep their buttons, the lace and a little envelope with my grandmother´s handwriting that says “cute little things from the past.”
Extract from Broderies by Audrey Demarre.
ME: Did you discover any surprising “conversations” between the artists once their works were gathered together – common motifs, obsessions, or emotional textures?
AD: Yes, many. Even though the artists come from different countries, ages, and backgrounds, their work often echoes one another. There’s a shared tenderness, a recurring use of red thread, silhouettes, childhood, and wounds. I was struck by how many stitched things left unsaid – grief, desire, memory – all carried silently in thread. It felt like these pieces spoke across time, in a language only the needle knows. The line between text and textile is not just blurred – it’s braided. Both are mediums of memory, both invite slowness, and both, in her words, “make the invisible visible.”
ME: Your writing suggests a rich poetic connection between text and textile. You write, “Un texte est souvent un tissu brodé.” (A text is often an embroidered fabric), How do you see language and embroidery as kindred forms?
AD: Both are ways of making the invisible visible. In language, we stitch letters into meaning. In embroidery, we pull something from the body – through the hand and thread. Both require patience. Both hold stories. I think the needle and the pen are sisters. They can mend. They can pierce. I learned how to write intellectually. I have the skills; it is sort of my past. Yet, when I embroider, I am free; my head is not involved. There is freedom. Writing about embroidery is another freedom. When I talk about threads, I find my path, my in-between world, my own space.
Extract from Broderies by Audrey Demarre.
ME: There is a recurring tension in your words between tradition and subversion, especially around the gendered history of embroidery. How do you see this art form reclaiming space or redefining power today?
AD: Historically, embroidery was considered decorative, domestic, feminine – something soft and secondary. But I see today’s artists reclaiming that softness and turning it into a form of resistance. There’s something deeply political in choosing slowness, giving voice to the intimate, and turning the private into public. These stitches hold strength. They say: this matters.
In the last decades, things have changed. Textile art has emerged today as a key medium in contemporary creation. From Sheila Hicks to Chiharu Shiota, Olga de Amaral to Joana Vasconcelos, these artists have transformed thread, weaving, and fibre into sculptural languages, capable of unfolding both intimate and collective stories while commanding space through monumental installations.
Ironically, it was within the male-led avant-garde Bauhaus (founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius) that textile art began to gain serious attention. Though the school promoted the abolition of the divide between fine arts and applied arts, most women were directed toward the textile workshop, seen as a “natural extension” of their skills. Neither Gropius nor his peers anticipated that the textile workshop – hurriedly created due to the influx of female students – would become one of the school's most innovative labs. Under artists like Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers, weaving became a laboratory of form and colour, integrating modernist, abstract experimentation that paralleled work in painting and design. Yet it would take decades for fibre art to be fully recognised in contemporary art.
Olga de Amaral, whose stunning retrospective just closed at the Fondation Cartier, dreamed of being an architect – a male-dominated field. Redirected to a weaving workshop, she studied textile design and ran a home furnishing business until 2000. Her art, however, grew parallel: obsessed with colour, texture, form, and light, she crafted complex textile units – bands and triangles – assembled into volumetric works. Architecture remained her guiding principle, and in her pieces, where gold threads mix with natural fibers, she erases the line between tapestry and painting, as well as humble and precious materials. This exhibition is one of the most important ones I have seen recently.
Extract from Broderies by Audrey Demarre.
ME: You write beautifully about the needle as “une toute petite épée,” a small sword – both tool and weapon. Can you expand on how embroidery can hold trauma, healing, and memory simultaneously?
AD: The needle has always struck me as paradoxical and as a tool for metamorphosis. It wounds, and it repairs. It pierces, and it connects. So many of the artists in the book use embroidery to process something they cannot say out loud – loss, exile, the body’s changes. Thread becomes a way to write what can’t be spoken. The repetition of the gesture, the care of the hand, the slowness of the work – it’s all part of the healing. In a world that moves so quickly, embroidery says: I am here and taking time.
ME: In the chapter “REMÉMORER,” you speak of thread as a way of marking time and navigating memory. How do you think embroidery reclaims or reshapes personal and collective histories?
AD: Embroidery carries time within it. Each stitch is a second, a thought, a pause. And when you look at a finished piece, you’re not just seeing the image – you’re seeing the hours, the silence, the presence of the maker. In that way, it holds memory more tenderly than almost anything else. It is remembered by us. And by putting private memories into public view – into exhibitions, books, museums – we say: these lives mattered. These feelings matter. It’s a quiet act of historical reclamation.
Extract from Broderies by Audrey Demarre.
ME: What was the most emotionally surprising piece of art you encountered while creating this anthology?
AD: That’s difficult to answer because they all touched me differently. The cover is by Michelle Kingdom. I love how the woman enters into the book and carries with her a whole universe. Is it a dream, a fairytale or a nightmare?
ME: Do you still stitch yourself, or has writing become your main form of embroidery?
AD: I still stitch, but I do so slowly, quietly, and rarely for show. Writing has become another thread for me – another way to assemble fragments, to pull meaning from the tangled. But embroidery is still there, always. It lives in my hands, even when I’m typing. Embroidery brought me back to writing.
ME: Finally, if you were to stitch a single word onto fabric today – one that holds the essence of this project – what would it be, and why?
AD: Lineage. In French, it means both memory and to remember. It’s what embroidery does best. It keeps things close. It holds them gently so they don’t disappear. Lineage is what connects the thread!
Written by Marcella Echavarria
marcella@marcellaechavarria.com
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Further information:
Broderies is available in French from Editions de la Martiniere.
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Image Credits:
LEAD: Portrait of Audrey Demarre in her studio by Julie Ansiau
All other images as credited in photo captions.