Sandrine Torredemer
La Filature
Embroiderer
Perpignan, France
The liveliness unearthed from recycled fabric
- Sandrine works entirely by hand to create her scenic tapestries
- She had a first career in engineering before turning to contemporary textile art
- At the heart of her practice are reclaimed materials, elevated to artistry through her embroidery
Sandrine Torredemer was taught embroidery by her grandmother from the age of five, and it has been with her throughout her life. For 30 years, Sandrine ran a career as a public works engineer, embroidering in the evenings to find rhythm and inner calm. In 2022, after a series of hardships, she took the leap and decided to devote herself entirely to her craft, under the name La Filature. Sandrine's work blends reclaimed fabric with hand embroidery, as she layers a dazzling variety of fabrics, from cotton T-shirts to netting or discarded canvas, to create vivid scenes of life around the Mediterranean, featuring people, water and landscapes. Her tapestries are now exhibited in international galleries.
Discover her work
INTERVIEW
I go thrifting. Shallot nets, hospital scrub gowns, a T-shirt with palm trees on it, anything can become sea, sky or vegetation for my works. The constraint of recycling forces me to be inventive. That is what I love most about my craft.
I build a scene layer by layer, like a puzzle of sewn fabrics, and then I add all the details with embroidery. I never use glue, instead I use extremely fine glove thread so that the stitches stay invisible, and very fine needles so as not to leave holes in the fabric.
I almost always work from a photo, either one I have taken myself or one I find in the press. I love the contrast between the immediacy of a news image and the time embroidery takes. That gap between the instant and slowness is something I find deeply appealing.
A lesson I learned from the architects I used to work with is that constraint leads to the right project. I would rather thrift than buy in a store, because buying is simply too easy. It was constraint, running short on thread, not deliberate calculation, that led me to mix fabric and embroidery at the start of my journey in craft.
Sandrine Torredemer
La Filature
Embroiderer
Perpignan, France
ADDRESS
Address upon request, Perpignan, France
AVAILABILITY
By appointment only
LANGUAGES
French
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