Chloe Van der Kindere is a self-taught artist who hand-stitches quilts and embroideries at the scale of her own body. Having trained in architecture for twenty years, she moved to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia with her family following the pandemic, leaving behind her teaching career and architectural practice. Partly in response to the practicalities of parenthood and a lack of studio space, she took up quilting in her new environment, a technique she describes as a "sofa-practice." This allowed her to raise a young family and create work from home. Her studio is the domestic space she inhabits, spread between the kitchen, the living room and a room she has carved out between her children's bedrooms. She originally learnt to quilt from her great-grandmother as a child, and both her grandmothers embroidered tapestries.
For her PG Studios presentation, Van der Kindere has developed a new body of work called the 1:1 series, in which she creates tapestries at the scale of her own body using a mixed-media approach comprising cyanotype, drawing, found objects and embroidery. All the quilting is painstakingly done by hand, using gathered materials: cloth from places she has travelled to, worn family clothing, hand-dyed fabrics and household materials. The series relays autobiographical moments in her life, and often takes official records as its starting point. Van der Kindere translates these instruments - a medical report, a child's growth chart, a floor plan, a tax return - distorting their clinical form and stitching back what each one had left out, to create a lived account of the event, worked at the scale of her own body.
Six works are presented in the series. Body Forensic (2023) stitches Van der Kindere's experience of endometriosis and the hysterectomy and bowel surgery that followed in two registers. Her intact anatomy is rendered fine and precise, while the distorted parts of her anatomy are rendered loose and exaggerated. Its companion, Visual Field (2023-24), embroiders parts of her brain from MRI scans, relaying the mental impact of her undiagnosed endometriosis. As a counterweight, Maternal Cartography (2024) uses the same body for love and intimacy rather than damage, mapping the contact zones between Van der Kindere and her children by laying cloth against their skin and tracing these moments of interaction.
This is followed by In/Out Pregnancy (2026), created using a cyanotype technique, which relays a sense of emptiness drawn from a memory of standing at a traffic light after giving birth, feeling like an empty cylinder. And finally, Trousseau (2025) turns to family heritage, bringing together three textiles - her grandmother's lace curtain, once worn as a child's dress-up veil; her other grandmother's negligee, carried unworn through every house move of her life; and her great-grandmother's lace, placed along the lines of the artist's own surgical scars.
The work is underpinned by a lived, rather than theoretical, feminism, drawn from Van der Kindere's experience of illness, motherhood, migration, family and the home. The slow and iterative nature of textile work allows her to explore the contradictions of feminine experience and to stitch together its component parts: grief and gladness, damage and love, intimacy and anger intermingle equally across the surface of her intricately worked quilts. Together, these six works form the first time the 1:1 series has been shown as a whole.
