There are easier ways to decorate a purse than spending several days covering it in tiny flowers made from thread.
Luckily, Thảo Nguyên does not seem particularly interested in the easier ways.
She turned her long-standing interest in hand embroidery into professional work more than a decade ago, creating purses, headbands and other accessories covered in elaborate floral designs.
From chemistry and architecture to thread
Thảo's path into embroidery is one of the things I find particularly interesting about her work.
Her background is not in some romantic old family workshop passed down unchanged for generations. She studied chemistry and later architecture.
At first that sounds like a fairly adventurous detour on the way to making embroidered purses.
Look at the finished work for a while, though, and architecture suddenly makes quite a lot of sense.
Her designs depend heavily on composition: how large a flower should be, where a branch needs to bend, how empty space balances a dense cluster of colour and how the decoration has to work with the shape of the object underneath it.
The result is decorative without becoming chaotic.
Three days for a purse
A heavily embroidered purse can take Thảo around three full days to complete.
That becomes easier to understand when you look closely.
A single design may contain a dozen colours, with different stitches creating petals, leaves, stems, buds and tiny details that are barely noticeable from a distance but make the whole pattern work.
The flowers are not simply repeated motifs stamped across a surface. They overlap, grow around one another and use different directions and densities of thread to create depth.
You can see immediately that somebody had to think about where every part should go.
And then somebody had to sit down and actually stitch it there.
Flowers everywhere
Floral embroidery is very much Thảo's territory.
Sometimes the colours are strong and dramatic; sometimes they are soft enough that the whole piece feels almost like a botanical sketch translated into thread.
Headbands give her much less space than purses, which makes the composition problem even more interesting. A handful of flowers and leaves has to work on a narrow strip of fabric without looking cramped.
Again, this is one of those cases where the finished object hides the amount of work rather effectively.
You see a pretty headband.
You do not necessarily see the hours of tiny decisions sitting inside it.
Form still has to follow function
Decoration is only half the problem.
A purse remains a purse, and it still has to survive the thoroughly unromantic realities of everyday use: cards, coins, receipts, keys, things we were absolutely certain we had put into another pocket and the occasional object whose purpose we no longer remember.
That is another place where I suspect Thảo's design background shows. The embroidered surface may be the first thing you notice, but the construction underneath still has to make sense.
Passing it on
Thảo does not keep the technique to herself.
She also organises embroidery workshops, teaching other people how to build up motifs from individual stitches and, presumably, discovering once again that things which look perfectly obvious after ten years of practice are considerably less obvious to somebody holding the needle for the first time.
I like this part of craft particularly much.
Skills survive because somebody bothers to teach them.
Not necessarily because they are ancient, not because they have been declared cultural heritage, and not because somebody puts them behind glass in a museum.
They survive because one person sits beside another and says: no, put the needle through here.
Thảo Nguyên
When Sang first introduced me to Thảo's work, the immediate attraction was obvious: the embroidery is simply beautiful.
What makes it worth remembering, though, is the person and the work behind it.
Years of practice, a very good eye for composition, three days disappearing into a single purse and enough patience left afterwards to teach somebody else how to do it.
That is the sort of effort Avanova's People & Craft section exists to appreciate.
If you would like to know whether we currently have work by Thảo Nguyên available, you can contact us.