Ayumi Abe’s embroidered piece stood out during the judging process and received the Jury Prize because I was drawn to the thread’s sculptural tension and the vibrant composition. The artist’s mother describes Ayumi’s love of Saori weaving and in this piece, I can see a similar practice of free-form image building within the densely stitched landscape. Much like seminal works of Abstract Expressionism, the piece’s "all-over" composition engages the entire surface, avoiding a single focal point. Within the rich color palette of desert earth tones, circles bubble to the surface and deep canyons of tight, zigzagged stitches loop across.
The tension of layered stitches adds another dimension to the composition, buckling the linen surface into a sculptural topography. Personal petroglyphs with unknown significance can be seen within the texture, dictating and referencing the passage of two kinds of time; the artist’s time stitching and glacially-slow geological time.