Thread, Code & a Summer in Portugal - Embroidery Master Class Portugal
Textile Summer School — Embroidery Master Class, July 2026
There is something wonderfully strange about teaching embroidery to a room full of artists who aren’t necessarily embroiderers.
A sculptor sees structure.A painter sees colour.A photographer sees composition.An installation artist immediately starts wondering what happens if the thread leaves the surface altogether.
This summer, I spent time at Córtex Frontal in Portugal, teaching an Embroidery Master Class as part of its month-long Textile Summer School — an intensive programme exploring embroidery, weaving and natural dyeing.
Set in a beautiful house and studio in the Alentejo, the residency brought together artists from Portugal, Spain, the former Yugoslavia and Canada. Different backgrounds, different disciplines, very different ways of seeing.
Which was exactly what made it interesting.
Starting with a stitch
Embroidery can look complicated when you first encounter it. In reality, everything begins with something incredibly simple: thread passing through cloth.
We started there.
Basic stitches. How thread behaves. How tension changes a line. How the same stitch can feel completely different depending on the yarn, the cloth, the scale or the hand making it.
From there, I divided the process into three ways of thinking.
Stitches to draw.Using thread as line, mark and gesture.
Stitches to paint.Building colour, density, shading and surface.
Stitches to build.Moving away from the flat surface and using thread to create texture, volume and three-dimensional form.
The aim was never simply to teach people how to embroider beautifully.
I wanted each artist to understand what embroidery could become inside their own practice.
A very old technology
One of the most fascinating parts of teaching textiles is how quickly the conversation moves between the ancient and the contemporary.
In Arraiolos, that connection is everywhere.
We explored the traditional Arraiolos stitch, part of a textile history that has been passed from hand to hand for centuries. Patterns, techniques and information stored in cloth long before we thought about data in the way we do today.
And then we introduced AI.
That combination might sound contradictory. For me, it makes complete sense.
Because embroidery is, in many ways, an early form of coding.
There is a system.There are instructions.There are sequences.Patterns are repeated, altered and passed on.Information becomes visual through a set of rules.
A stitch is a tiny instruction.
Repeat it hundreds of times and you have an image.
Change the instruction and the image changes.
Suddenly, the distance between a centuries-old embroidery pattern and a generative digital process doesn’t feel quite so enormous.
We used contemporary technology and AI platforms to disrupt the process rather than replace it — introducing unpredictability, reinterpreting patterns and asking what happens when old systems of making meet completely new ones.
That tension interests me enormously.
Hand and machine. Tradition and experimentation. Knowledge inherited and knowledge invented.
Finding a language in thread
The most rewarding part was watching each artist stop thinking about embroidery as a technique and begin treating it as a language.
Someone approaches thread like drawing.
Someone else becomes obsessed with texture.
Another pushes the stitch until it hardly resembles embroidery anymore.
That is usually the moment I am waiting for.
Technical skills matter. Craft matters enormously. But technique becomes much more interesting when somebody starts breaking it intelligently.
Teaching, for me, has always worked both ways.
I bring years of experience with textiles, colour, pattern and embroidery into the room. Then another artist looks at something I know intimately from a completely different angle and suddenly I see it again.
That exchange is probably the best part.
I left Portugal incredibly proud of what the artists had made — and equally inspired by their curiosity, experimentation and willingness to pull things apart and put them back together differently.
Back next summer
And apparently I haven’t had enough.
I’ll be returning to Córtex Frontal next European summer to teach two classes.
More thread. More experimentation. More conversations between ancient techniques and contemporary ideas.
And almost certainly a few things none of us have thought of yet.
More details coming soon.
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