By Pamela Fink

The spell:
The heart is a pivot, a crab in a sea of emotions orchestrated by the moon. A spider of earth and water, weaving dreams with threads of sand and cloud, roots and salt. Embroidering the sky with foam and its flow with flowers, my world in a handkerchief overflowing in immensity.

This is the poem that accompanies the new textile creation of Paloma Dominguez entitled “The World is a Handkerchief” a phrase that usually refers to how futile the human experience is but in this case it is resized and adapted to infinite possibilities that link us all by an invisible thread. 

And this same thread of destiny was what wove the flow of Paloma's life with Saint MichaelIt was upon arriving as a stranger that she decided to literally give her beating heart to our beautiful home by sticking hand-embroidered hearts on the doors of our entire town, and this poetic act was what ironically opened the doors for her. 

Once established, this skilled weaver dedicated herself to telling stories through weaving, using multiple techniques and fusing different artistic disciplines, even from almost forgotten corners, all based on history. 

It is the story that commands the pieces and it is in favor of what the image wants to convey that everything else arises. The story commands the type of embroidery that must be done and the type of material that will accompany it. 

An example of this could be illustrated with “Sugar Shell” which at first glance represents an angelic figure breaking the layer of its shell to take flight in the purest style of Botticelli's Venus. 

For this piece, Paloma used assemblage, hand embroidery and needle lace with cotton, silk and clay as materials that are appropriate when trying to portray the fragility of the shell and the courage needed to emerge from it. 

Well, as Herman Hesse said in his work Damian, "the chick that does not break the shell will die without having been born", something like that happens with the artist's works that at the moment in which she decides that they are already telling the story is in that instant, the second in which she helps them to be born before the world and the gaze of Saint Michael.