An electric blue bird, a pair of purple- and green-faced owls and a multicolored pigeon, the work of embroidery artist Leela Bear is certainly vivid.

But look beyond the brilliant colors and you will find an intricate study of patterns.

Made in circles -- a rejection of the “mass-produced” feel of standard rectangular frames -- her work looks at the Mandelbrot patterns found in natural subjects.

Birds commonly appear in the work of Bear, who exhibited at galleries and the Absa KKNK art festival in her native South Africa before relocating to Korea. But it’s the patterns of the feathers they have rather than the symbolism she is interested in.

“I’m quite obsessed with birds and flowers. Birds, to me, are not the silly symbolism of freedom the whole time. I really just love how they look and I’m quite fascinated by pigeons that have all these lovely patterns on them, so that’s something that is more of an inspiration for my work. And I draw a lot on similar patterns that you find all over nature and also in architecture.”

Bear will be leading a workshop in Daejeon next week, explaining a little about the history of the art form and leading people through some basic steps on brooches and other items she has made. 

“Basically embroidery is one of the oldest art forms in society. We’ve always sought to beautify things and since we started making clothes we started doing embroidery. Decorating things both functionally and just to beautify an item,” said Bear.

“It’s something that has been practiced locally with virtually no communication between cultures for the longest time. So that’s something I want to look at as well.”

Bear started out in painting, but began embroidery after meeting an established artist in the field after moving to a farm.

“She gave me a couple of threads and a ring and said, ‘come on, you can do it, it’s terribly easy,’” she recalls. “The other big thing she said to me is that embroidery is basically just drawing with thread and that immediately resonated with me.”

“I felt I had a knack for it. It slowed me down a lot more and I could explore things that I otherwise couldn’t.”

She says that while the toys are more at the craft end of the scale, her embroidery should be seen as art, pointing out that it shares many common approaches with other art genres, including composition elements like focal points, subject matter and balance.

She tries to avoid unpicking her work to focus instead on allowing the piece and the patterns within it to develop.

“A very common one you see all the time is roads that start cracking from whatever is happening under the roads. So the shifting of the soil and plants that may be growing, roots, and that starts cracking the tarmac. There are different patterns that emerge from that, and it’s a very natural flow,” she said.

“That’s something I try to explore in my embroidery by not picking the piece. I keep going with what is happening with that flow. It becomes more challenging to do that, to flow with what the piece is doing rather than pushing it where you want it to go.”

You can find out more about Bear’s work and the workshop at the Daejeon Arts Collective website at djartsco.org.

By Paul Kerry (paulkerry@heraldcorp.com)