Emma Reichenbach

Emma Reichenbach holds a Bachelor's degree in Fine Art from Leeds University and a Master’s degree in Fashion Textiles from Central Saint Martins, London, and has over twenty-five years of international experience in fashion embroidery design, university teaching and art practice. Her career spans London, Italy and New York, where she has worked both in-house and through her own studio to create original, intricately embellished textile designs for leading global fashion houses.

A lifelong collector of vintage and antique costume and textiles, Emma merges this passion with her love of collage, patchwork and embroidery. Her current body of work, Ten Years in the Making reflects this synthesis, drawing from a rich archive of original embroidered textiles accumulated over a decade of design practice. Each finished piece is a unique composition, reimagining fragments through motif, form and colour into one-of-a-kind textile collages.

Emma is currently a lecturer on the Textiles BA programme at Bath Spa University and develops her personal textile-based art from her studio at Bath Artists Studios.

“Ten Years in the Making is a visual documentation of embroidered pieces I designed, hand-stitched, commissioned or salvaged from 2011 to 2021, a period of fast-paced creativity while working for a New York fashion house and through my own studio in Brooklyn. I revisited these fragments from a different perspective, combining them into patchworked narratives that speak a new, unexpected language. Each final piece is singular; impossible to replicate.”

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