I choose to work in the medium of cross stitch to comment on our society in the 21st century, and also because I am very interested in women’s issues. Cross stitch is representative of domesticity and women’s work, as women were at one point required to posses such skills to acquire work and look after the needs of their family. I wish to give new life to the “kitsch” traditional samplers often seen in 19th and 20th century homes celebrating births and marriages. I create my pieces by selecting motifs from vintage cross stitch books, wishing to retain a classical look, and to recreate the quaint and ‘cutesy’ aesthetic that samplers are best known for. I then compose my samplers using an interactive cross stitch grid on photoshop, combining modern and traditional techniques. I am predominantly influenced by the new genre of textile artists subverting the traditional mediums processes and concepts such as Mr X Stitch, Cayce Zavaglia, Severja Incruisiante, Alicia Ross and Carolyn Marsden. Artists such as these are bringing the traditional up to date and remind the modern art viewer about the decline of traditional skills and processes. The primary concept behind my work is the fictional ideal of a definable ‘normality’. I wish to make people consider their own definitions of normal and abnormal; acceptability and deviancy, and re-asses whether or not they ‘fit into the box’.