Comics Craftivism by Lotta Sjöberg.

The embroideries of Lotta Sjöberg contain many stories. The aging female body. Motherhood. Worrying about not being good enough. Expectations. Everything commented on with unrelenting honesty. Surveyed and examined with patient stitches.  

Anxiety, depressions, brooding, and lack of purpose makes the black humour an indispensable companion. Here, mental illness is depicted with a slightly absurd, quiet drama. Actually, the humour is at its best – and most longed-for – in the darkness.  

With pen, needle, and thread, she punctures the norms of happiness – to own things, the summer idyll, the marriage, the fashion trends. The happy things become rather uninteresting. Lacking humour.  

“I often start by embroidering a face, 
that almost always appears as abject or worried. It just turns out that way. 
It is as if my fingers were unable to create something happy.”  

Drawing things is quick, she has to slow down to take care of her creations. To let them take a physical shape, get crumpled up and entangled.  Embroidery is by its nature a slow process, where ideas and puns appear along the way. There is a thoughtfulness that thrives in the slowness. It defies our current fast, profitable, and productive world. The value of embroidery cannot be assessed, it escapes our systems of evaluation. That is a source of enormous power.  

Comics craftivism is the new name of an art form that has emerged in the area between comics drawing and the growing craftivism movement. In craftivism, yarn graffiti, embroidered public messages, and knitted clothes on sculptures are used to provide warmth, life, and colour, and to share opinions in the public space.  

Picture forums on the Internet are broadcasting this art form all over the world, in a spirit of activism, as an alternative to mass production. A single piece of embroidery with its message can be distributed everywhere, without profit.