A textile artist from London Harriet Riddell uses her sewing machine to embroider in unusual public places!

Urban sketching is gaining popularity. People, drawing in their notebooks, can be seen in different parks, restaurants or coffee shops near the city's attractions. You just need to always carry a small notebook or a sketchbook and a few writing materials, or just a pen or a pencil.

But the embroiderer from London Harriet Riddell is not looking for easy ways. Imagine how it is to carry a sewing machine, fabrics and thread instead of an album!

Harriet studied "Contemporary applied arts" at the University of Hertfordshire and then moved to London. She can be found periodically in various places of the capital, embroidering portraits of people or the environment. Also, she managed to work in trains, laundries and at bus stops.

Harriet says that her grandmother, a textile artist from Canada, cultivated the love for needlework in her. The first time she felt the magic of the stitches and the lines when she was five, machine embroidery fascinated her. And she started to draw with stitches in a free-running technique in 2012, and since then she has constantly been developing her skills.

Embroiderer calls herself a "performance textile artist", which, incidentally, is true. She derives a real pleasure from sewing in front of the audience, enjoying the interaction with it. Delivering and configuring a sewing machine in a hot-filled evening train, to create a picture of the stitches, really looks like a show! The most difficult part is to portray people because they are constantly moving.

The works of Harriet can be described as works of art. The artist uses threads and fabrics instead of brushes and paints. When she starts to make a portrait, she asks models about themselves, because people like talking about themselves, thus they relax and behave naturally.

Harriet is inspired by the works of Gustav Klimt and Grayson Perry, as well as by the works of other artists that play with the boundaries between art and craft.
But not only the streets of London attract the artist as a place of work. Once she was able to work in a noisy shop of a Chinese shoe factory in Hong Kong. She also likes India, the textile capital of the world. Harriet travels the world with her machine, stopping in unusual places, from the slums of Nairobi to the tea fields in the Himalayas. Adventures and interaction are the key elements of all Harriet's works. Behind every stitch lies a story about people, place and culture. Going on a trip, the artist first packs her sewing machine, which she considers to be her best friend.

Harriet used to constantly look for a place where she could connect the machine to the network, she stayed near pubs, cafes, shops. And now passers-by help her, when she depicts them in her works, they pedal in gratitude!

Her works have been exhibited in London, Nairobi, New Delhi, Toronto, Paris, Hong Kong and Basel.