With 20 to watch, Flanders DC presents twenty emerging talents, who recently took their first steps in the worlds of design or fashion. We believe they will have great success in the future.

My work is difficult to put in a box. It sits somewhere between art and design, and it harks back to a fashion technique – namely, embroidery – which I use in a different context. I want to highlight the power of craftsmanship and the slowness that goes with it. While fast fashion undermines the quality of embroidery, I just want to demonstrate the wide range of possibilities. The fact that you can make countless combinations with one small glass pearl is impressive to me. I want to push the boundaries of embroidery, and explore its painterly, but also spatial qualities.

While designers often make sketches for embroidery on the computer these days, and then copy-paste elements, I deliberately draw everything by hand. I enlarge these preliminary drawings, which measure around ten centimetres, to 1.7 x 1 metre drawings in seven steps. At each stage, I add additional pieces by hand. The fact that you can see my hand in the lines, or that both sides are not perfectly symmetrical, gives the creation a soul.

It’s no easy task, especially in the two busy periods before the fashion season. But I have had a lot of opportunities over the past year, so the sale of my own work is actually going quite well. For example, I got my first solo exhibition at St. Vincents in Antwerp, my work was on display at Delen Private Bank at the BRAFA fair, and the famous American store Garde bought a number of pieces. As I’m not the best salesperson myself, it’s nice to see that my creations are catching on.