Embroidery for Anita Wasik is like meditation, a form of escape from stressful everyday life. Learning to embroider was the answer to the insomnia that accompanied the first days of motherhood. It started innocently enough with embroidering animals for her son’s room. Over time, embroidery ceased to be just a way to deal with sleepless nights. The preoccupation with embroidery develops and from small tambourines moves to a large loom, it is a leap into deep water with great scale.
Horizon is a project that represented Gdansk at the HanseArtWorks exhibition of Hanseatic cities. Hanseatic New Gold in Riga. It was created in the spring of 2021.
Horizon is an installation that consists of 16 embroidered tambours. Each represents a different country from which the Hanseatic cities originated. The embroideries represent different faces of the sea, and the tambours are like portholes of a ship through which one can see seascapes with a horizon line. The landscapes are on the verge of abstraction, made with loop embroidery in wool and cotton, and have a fleshy, three-dimensional character. Each landscape is different, once the water is calm, at other times it is agitated – just as the public moods in the countries around the Hanseatic League are different – but together they form one common horizon.
The patron of the Horizon – Horizon project is the City of Gdansk. The work was selected through a competition and was the artistic representation of Gdansk at the “Hanseatic New Gold” exhibition in Riga.