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...

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Written by Marcella Echavarria

marcella@marcellaechavarria.com

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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.