Embroidery is our core practice. In silk, cotton and raffia thread, with glass beads, crystals and sequins, we work motif, relief and narrative into cloth.
Embroidery is an art of addition. It takes a finished cloth and, through needlework, gives it what it did not have: motif, relief, light, narrative. It is perhaps the most ancient and most universal of all textile disciplines.
In the Highlands of Madagascar, the practice has deep roots in the textile culture of the Merina kingdom, where embroidered cloth has served ceremonial and domestic life since the sixteenth century. Its early repertoire was figurative: scenes of daily life, human figures, zebu, each motif encoding rank, kinship and destiny in the fabric. Our atelier in Lazaina, at the foot of the royal hills of Ambohimanga, belongs to that lineage and seeks to reinvent it.
We practise needle embroidery on frame, a demanding and patient discipline in which the hand works the stretched cloth stitch by stitch.
Working in silk, cotton and metallic thread, we command a wide technical range, from flat embroidery to raised work, from beading to smocking, where re-embroidered gathers coax relief out of the cloth itself. Romantic, luminous or mineral, the works that emerge from these gestures are shaped by this breadth: each commission finds the technique that serves it best, rather than bending to fit one.
From an ancestral vocabulary,
Ampela creates embroideries that are
contemporary, free and singular.
Stitching on cloth stretched over a frame, using varied techniques to form motifs, outlines and filled surfaces.
Beads, crystals and sequins set by hand with a needle, threaded or wrapped one by one.
Warp and weft threads are selectively withdrawn to create open patterns, held and outlined by embroidery thread.
Sections of cloth are cut away and the remaining edges finished with precise stitching, creating ornamentation in negative.