Embroidery and Bondage

By Erlend Helling-Larsen

Erlend Helling-Larsen is a Norwegian artist who studied at the Oslo School of Painting and Drawing and at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where he received a Bachelor of Arts. Embroidery is one of many media he uses. By stitching directly on torn out pages from magazines such as Playboy, he at times obscures, and at other times enhances, the eroticism of the images he selects.

Galleon figure

According to Google, bondage is a synonym to slavery. Amsterdam is a small cozy village. A romantic, sentimental, cruel, and nostalgic place. I wanted to write something about the impact of the port. The city as an ex- port city, or a post- port city? All the contrasts, juxtaposed with the stories, the lies, and the legends. All the animals come out at night. At the harbor, they are always everywhere. Everything goes down at Harbor. The stories, the lies, and the dreams travel fast. Dreams always travel fast at sea, even before the internet.

As a starting point, I wanted to be the most decent male artist on the planet. Lately I put more focus on the embroidery and the erotic aspects of my work. When I first started working on this project, I used embroidery as a tool to make nude photos decent. In my recent work, the nude models appear rather decent and the embroidery makes it more erotic and sometimes filthy. I think this development is parallel with my improving skills and growing interest in embroidery. Lately I do believe the borders between embroidery and bondage might also just be a question concerning scale and size. In computer terms, a port generally refers to the female part of connection.