Natalie Ciccoricco builds a distinctive fiber-based practice around embroidery, transforming thread, yarn, and rope into elements that coexist with paper, found materials, ink, sticks, and rocks. Born and raised in the Netherlands and now based in California, the self-taught artist developed her practice through an intuitive process that treats materials as active components of composition rather than merely supports. Her work frequently balances organic forms with geometric structures, creating visual relationships between the textures of nature and the precision of repeated stitches.
Nature occupies a central position in Ciccoricco’s visual language, but her approach is less about reproducing landscapes than about translating natural sensations into arrangements of color, texture, rhythm and form. Her practice incorporates materials collected from outdoor surroundings, while handmade and found elements can retain traces of their previous contexts. This combination gives her compositions a tactile quality in which delicate fibers meet harder or more irregular surfaces. Her process is deliberately exploratory: she selects materials and colors before stitching, allowing the repetitive physical act of embroidery to gradually shape the final composition.
The strength of Ciccoricco’s work lies in this tension between control and discovery. Carefully organized stitches can produce intricate structures, while stones, sticks, paper, and other found elements introduce irregularity and a sense of material history. Her practice has also evolved from earlier mixed-media collages using found imagery and embroidery toward increasingly fiber-centered constructions, maintaining an interest in giving discarded or ordinary materials renewed visual significance. Across these approaches, embroidery becomes more than a decorative technique: it functions as a way of drawing, assembling, and building relationships between contrasting materials.
More info: Website, Instagram.
