Livia Papiernik is a Franco-British artist working in hand embroidery and felt, creating work that spans the intimate and the immersive, always asking to be encountered as much as seen. Her practice is rooted in the belief that materials carry what words cannot: that memories, stories of love, grief and resilience become embedded in cloth.

Trained in the ancient traditions of hand embroidery and felting, Livia uses her technical mastery to challenge the visual potential of her craft and the places it inhabits. For her, technique is where play begins. She builds worlds in thread, from intricate embroidered windows to felted tapestries and installations made for public spaces, galleries, and homes.

Embroidery has long been women's language: intimate, communal, and systematically overlooked. Her work asks what happens when it is made monumental and when it reclaims the walls the way tapestries once shaped the great halls of history.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Following a degree at the Royal School of Needlework and a Masters from the Royal College of Art, where she held the Roger Walls Burns Scholarship, she was awarded the QEST Scholarship in 2026 and held her first solo exhibition at Batsford Gallery, London.

She has worked on projects for leading luxury interior and fashion houses, including Zoffany and Lock&Co. She is the co-founder and curator of BOUND, a gallery and collective dedicated to raising the profile of embroidery in the arts. She teaches and lectures across the UK, believing the future of textile art depends on each generation taking it further than the last.

Livia Papiernik's work is rooted in folklore and landscape, and in the belief that beauty is rarely just beautiful. Look closer into the ripple on water, the stitch, the half-familiar story and something else begins to emerge: something that quietly holds you in a space of wonder and reflection.

Water runs through her practice as a recurring presence, the way it refuses a single reading, its reflections shifting with light, with time, a surface that is never the same twice. Her imagery works in the same way: familiar forms from angles that make them strange, surfaces that look one way and mean another.

She is drawn to the ancient belief that landscape carries its own spirit; that to move through it slowly is to learn something about yourself that you could not have arrived at otherwise. Folklore has always known this: difficult truths in beautiful disguise, delivered in colour and wonder to those who will understand them more fully with time. Her images carry their own absurdities, things that feel almost right but hover at the edge of recognition. It is that playfulness that allows the harder things to get in.

In her practice, embroidery is not decoration, it is the alphabet of these stories. The needle draws the eye through the work, makes it rest where the meaning gathers. Felt becomes the ground beneath: built up in layers of texture and colour that reach not for what the world looks like, but for what it feels like.