the every man.

The incredible and a little off-putting stitched portraits of Scott Ellegood.

Scott creates high contrast, pixelated portraits of men on a dark black background- making the colors and face move forward in space and leaving a lot of ambiguity on the context of the male. A bit foreboding, very unspecific, and yet vulnerable and lost...

Scott states:

The embroidered portraits are an attempt to examine how we see ourselves and how we see other people.

We all approach other people with a predetermined set of historical and cultural expectations. Expectations are placed upon new acquaintances, strangers on the street, and even onto our most intimate friends.

We also create our own masks. We attempt to “be seen” in a certain way. We may wish to be noticed, or to blend into the background; whether consciously or through some internal defense mechanism...

As part of the design process, images are digitally manipulated to a point (or past a point), in which they no longer resemble the original “model". I attempt to create an “every-man", in which many different people can be seen in one image.

The surface is compromised, we can “see” what is beneath. We have a way of navigating a space, exploring an undiscovered (hidden) world. Possibly enabling a path to really seeing the truth within a person.

His erasure of the individual into an "every man" is very successful in my opinion and says something about out culture and the experience of being a human in the digital age. I do wonder why he chooses embroidery as a medium and how he began to use it.


See more of his work including one detail- he needs more as I can imagine how lush and amazing these are up close- here.