How about a Most Excellent $15,000.00 Brigid Berlin needlepoint pillow as a gift this holiday season?
From the John McWhinnie website, "Brigid Berlin has turned to the traditionally ladylike craft of needlepoint to create work that continues to challenge the social status quo, defy convention, and pose questions about taste and society. An avid consumer of tabloid newspapers, the “popular press” as it’s referred to in Britain, she translates front page headline broadsheets into genteel features of interior décor. Her subjects are typically crude, salacious paper-selling press announcements in origin designed to appall, shock, and titillate viewers. The meticulously executed needlepoint pieces transform the daily ghastliness of news occurrences and media spin into demure domestic objects of quaint design and questionable comfort. News products designed for a momentary frisson of engagement are rendered into soft edged but durable monuments that outlive the typical transitory lifespan expected of such unpalatable printed exclamations. Only, perhaps, by virtue of their fleeting existence – bought one day and consigned to the garbage the next - do we routinely tolerate the raging excesses of the contemporary newspaper industry. Plush and tactile as the finished works might be they defy any but the hardiest to cozy up to them. Sweetheart cushions they are not."
From the John McWhinnie website, "Brigid Berlin has turned to the traditionally ladylike craft of needlepoint to create work that continues to challenge the social status quo, defy convention, and pose questions about taste and society. An avid consumer of tabloid newspapers, the “popular press” as it’s referred to in Britain, she translates front page headline broadsheets into genteel features of interior décor. Her subjects are typically crude, salacious paper-selling press announcements in origin designed to appall, shock, and titillate viewers. The meticulously executed needlepoint pieces transform the daily ghastliness of news occurrences and media spin into demure domestic objects of quaint design and questionable comfort. News products designed for a momentary frisson of engagement are rendered into soft edged but durable monuments that outlive the typical transitory lifespan expected of such unpalatable printed exclamations. Only, perhaps, by virtue of their fleeting existence – bought one day and consigned to the garbage the next - do we routinely tolerate the raging excesses of the contemporary newspaper industry. Plush and tactile as the finished works might be they defy any but the hardiest to cozy up to them. Sweetheart cushions they are not."
