The skin as embroidered canvas

In mending guide, Lara de los Reyes wields a needle, a thread, and the palm of her hand to unsettle long-held notions on art-making.

Written by Chesca Santiago
October 4, 2023

Before a needle punctures deep enough to inflict a wound, there’s that thin layer of skin on our palm to shelter it from all the labor it must endure. This bare millimeter of skin, protecting the palm from rupture and bleeding, is Lara de los Reyes’s medium in mending guide, her latest solo exhibition at West Gallery.

Mending guide marks de los Reyes’s return after years of hiatus as an exhibiting artist. Compact with but the slightest object list, the exhibition is substantial in the questions it raises on the nature of art-making. It documents de los Reyes using her skin as canvas, self-stitching the outline of a sparrow onto the topmost layer of her left hand. It’s essentially a step-by-step guide to de los Reyes’s self-inflicted opus, the entire process captured in modest documentation. A video of the actual sewing is projected on the room’s center wall. Normally, one would anticipate a wince or two with every puncture of the skin. But there’s a certain calmness to de los Reyes’s nimble stitches—the needle nudged into the skin and the thread pulled out with graceful dexterity.

The finished embroidered work is juxtaposed with a video projection of the actual sewing process.

Flanking the projection are two photographs showing two ends of the procedure: the finished embroidered sparrow in one frame; then the palm in the aftermath, left with vestiges of the removed sutures. In the latter, all thread has been unraveled and removed to show needle punctures—peeled skin and some wounds—where the stitches used to be. The rest of the exhibition is comprised of an embroidered measuring tape bearing de los Reyes’s name and a flip book showing the process in gradual succession.

Two nodes of the production process—the finished sparrow and its aftermath.

De los Reyes’s body is no stranger to fine needlework. In a previous work (as in her entry to Art Fair Philippines 2017), she embroidered hair on satin fabric that bore the most precise stitches—her needlework showed the exact bends and breaks of animals, fingers, and other figures. Across works, she has turned her body into both form and medium, away from the usual orientations of the body as artistic material—not as a surface for a tattoo. Or a conduit for performance art. But as embroidered canvas.

Yet in a move that redirects emphasis away from the final product, mending guide marks a processual turn in our idea of art-making. The idea of a work as a single outcome is subverted, marking a rightful comeback for de los Reyes, whose practice gravitates towards unorthodox creative forms. Here, the entire production process, from the first puncture of the needle into the skin until after the stitches have been removed, is rendered as exhibition material. In turn, the acts of making and mending are similarly disrupted. Making and mending no longer mean mere assembling, repairing, and putting together; de los Reyes has expanded these to include their antithesis—removal, destruction, and aftermath included. Thus, as we move across the exhibition’s media showing one step of the process after another, we realized that to be able to make and mend is to necessarily puncture, tear, and destroy, too.

Mending guide is on view at West Gallery until 14 October 2023.