NeedleXChange

In this episode of NeedleXChange I interview Róisín Phelan , a contemporary embroidery and textile artist who has built her practice around punch needle. We start on common ground (a shared love of squared notebooks and to-do lists) before getting into how she creates the visual identity for the family brewery, the cafe, and the Colours coffee company, and how building a whole visual "world" means a new design comes together in an afternoon rather than a fortnight. Róisín talks candidly about be

In this episode of NeedleXChange, I interview Sean Alistair, a Germany-based contemporary embroidery and textile art artist known for work that mixes beauty, chaos, identity and emotional honesty. After the first chat, I realised I needed to ask Sean more directly about the work itself, so we spoke again. In this final part, we dig into Sean’s artistic practice: music as a way of naming and feeling the work, anti-war imagery, anger as creative fuel, why “pretty” can be the wrong read, how feedba

In this episode of NeedleXChange, I interview Sean Alistair, a Germany-based contemporary embroidery and textile art artist known for work that mixes beauty, chaos, identity and emotional honesty. In this part, we move from the studio into parenthood. Sean talks about becoming a dad, the strange way men are praised for basic childcare, how having a baby interrupts and reshapes a creative life, and the difference between Sean Alistair the artist and Sean the dad. We also spin through Sean's cultu

In this episode of NeedleXChange, I interview Sean Alistair, a Germany-based contemporary embroidery and textile art artist known for work that mixes beauty, chaos, identity and emotional honesty. In this first part we focus on Into the Wild , the exhibition Sean curated to build community rather than simply put work on walls. We talk about diversity without tokenism, what it means to be an outsider artist, labels like queer, bipolar and textile artist, and how Sean thinks about making, destroyi

In this episode of NeedleXChange, I interview Renan Estivan, a São Paulo-based contemporary embroidery and textile art artist known for queer tapestries that put the male body at their centre. In this part we get into Maressia and Bataille's idea that the post-industrial body isn't allowed to rest, what slow work has taught Renan about his own queerness, why textile slips past the censors in ways photography doesn't, his current Marseille solo show L'Homme Renommé, and his cultural touchpoints.

In this episode of NeedleXChange, I interview Renan Estivan, a São Paulo-based contemporary embroidery and textile art artist known for queer tapestries that put the male body at their centre. In Part 1 we get into his mum's Arraíolos rugs and the embroidery tradition she passed on, choosing design at UNESP over art, how the pandemic in Salvador collided with a pixel-art drawing to spark his first erotic cross stitch, his shift onto the tufting gun, and the Brazilian tapestry lineage running fro