The Ambivalence of Embroidery Piercing Front and Back
— On the Works of Ryoji Morimoto
Tomoo Kusumoto
Curator, Tsunagi Art Museum
(Senior Officer, Policy Planning Division, Tsunagi Town)
At a solo exhibition by Ryoji Morimoto that I visited¹, visitors were invited to exchange a written text for one of the small works on display. At the recommendation of the organiser, I took home a work consisting of embroidery stitched onto fabric printed with a landscape from the English countryside where Morimoto is based, and from time to time I find myself gazing alternately at its front and back sides in my study.
Roland Barthes argued that the moment a camera shutter is released, time is fixed and the world is framed from a single point of view. For Barthes, the essence of photography lies in its ability to testify to the existence of what is depicted there². In other words, according to Barthes, photography always captures the world one-sidedly, rendering invisible whatever world might exist behind the image.
Morimoto, however, turns his attention toward that reverse side. He prints different photographs onto two separate pieces of fabric and places them together with their unprinted sides facing inward. Taking one side provisionally as the “front,” he pierces the fabric with a needle, passes thread through it, and embroiders the surface. Seen from the front, the stitches appear to follow the forms within the printed image. In some works, layers of differently coloured threads are sewn along the contours of the photographed forms; in others, countless tiny fragments accumulate into a mosaic-like total image, the surface densely filled with vibrant threads. Viewed only from the front, the embroidery seems to trace the world contained within the photograph. Yet when the work is turned over, the same threads emerge upon an entirely different image. Morimoto himself says that he is “not especially conscious of how the thread will appear on the opposite side.”³ He inserts the needle from the front, moves to the back, confirms where the thread has appeared there, and responds to that emergence by piercing the fabric once again toward the front. Through the accumulation of acts in which the needle penetrates the cloth, the thread simultaneously carries the contexts of two different worlds existing on the front and back surfaces, binding them together.
Furthermore, Barthes called the innumerable accidental details within a photograph, details unintended by the photographer that unexpectedly “prick” the viewer, the punctum, arguing that photographs containing such elements acquire a heightened value⁴ . Morimoto transforms Barthes’s metaphorical notion of “pricking” into a literal physical act. Embroidery interrupts the time that photography sought to fix, reopening the image that had been sealed within the photographic surface and generating new forms of value. In this sense, embroidery may be said to encourage the emergence of punctum within the two photographs printed on the fabric.
Equally important is the dual nature of the act of piercing fabric with a needle itself. Morimoto describes the act of stitching as both prayerful and violent⁵ . Like the traditional Japanese senninbari, a cloth stitched collectively to pray for someone’s safe return, it can function as an act of wishing for another’s well-being. At the same time, however, it is also an intrusion: an act that punctures the surface of the fabric, wounds the photographed image, and violates its integrity. Embroidery does not simply enrich the image; rather, it destroys the image once in order to prompt the construction of new relationships. Seen in this way, front and back are not merely differences in orientation. Depending on which side one encounters first, the appearance of the other side changes. The two surfaces remain equal, yet each bears a distinct aspect of its own.
Morimoto’s embroidery pierces images from which photography has already severed various relations, passing thread through to another world on the reverse side and unsettling the fixed viewpoint of the photographer. The viewer, often unconsciously, must choose which side to see first. Yet whichever side is chosen, the other remains persistently at the edge of consciousness, producing a drifting sensation in which meaning never fully settles. And it is precisely this sensation that constitutes the most essential question posed by Morimoto’s works employing photography and embroidery. Each time the needle penetrates the fabric, the question woven deep within the work alongside the thread resists easy resolution. Even now, as I continue to gaze alternately at the front and back sides in my study, I quietly wait for the contours of the answer Morimoto seeks to slowly emerge.
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¹ Ryoji Morimoto, Ryoji Morimoto Solo Exhibition: Traces in Flux, AIR motomoto, 2025.
² Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Hikaru Hanawa (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1985), pp. 105–112.
³ Ryoji Morimoto, artist talk for Ryoji Morimoto Solo Exhibition: Traces in Flux, November 16, 2025.
⁴ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Hikaru Hanawa (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1985), pp. 56–57.
⁵ Ryoji Morimoto, artist talk for Ryoji Morimoto Solo Exhibition: Traces in Flux, November 16, 2025.