TITLE:
In Rainbows
Handmade Album Cover

ROLE:
Typography
Free Motion Sewing
Painting

Radiohead’s seventh studio album, In Rainbows, very much explores the ideas of transience— the idea of starting in one place and ending up somewhere completely different. This release was true liberation from the group’s self-imposed pressure to innovate and truly embraced their capacity for artistic risks. For this handmade piece, I explored my own artistic risk with a medium I have never used before: free motion sewing on fabric.

Free motion is a method of machine sewing whereby you are effectively drawing with the needle. As the machine “floats” over the fabric, there is freedom to move the stitching in any desired direction, at any speed. After this process, I thickened some of the stitches by hand with a needle and thread.

In this composition, the threads begin to extend from the same point of origin and then ascend into various directions, symbolizing impermanence. The skeletal lines begin straight and then suddenly distort as they fully develop into shapes, mirroring the process of thought.