Chilean artist Paloma Castillo, represented by Isabel Croxatto Galería, is featured in an interview with Museu Têxtil, an international platform dedicated to the research and promotion of contemporary textile practices. The conversation explores Castillo’s artistic trajectory, the origins of her relationship with embroidery, and the way the technique became a central language within her practice.
Originally trained as a graphic designer, Castillo reflects on how her experience in editorial design shaped her understanding of composition, rhythm, space, and the relationship between image and text. Her encounter with embroidery came later, following a professional crisis, when she rediscovered in a technique learned during childhood a new possibility for artistic expression. “Embroidery was not only a technique I had learned in childhood, but a language with which I could tell and express what I wanted to say,” the artist explains.
The interview also explores her self-taught and experimental approach, through which errors, imperfections, and the repetition of stitches have become integral to her visual language. Rather than pursuing technical perfection, Castillo describes a process based on listening to the material and discovering its own possibilities.
Another central theme of the conversation is her use of paradox, contradiction, and irony as tools for engaging with Chilean and global realities. Through embroidery, the artist brings together seemingly unrelated images and ideas to generate new readings, inviting viewers to experience humor, discomfort, or reflection and ultimately complete the meaning of the work themselves.
The interview offers an insight into a practice where the traditions of handwork meet a contemporary approach to image-making, transforming thread, repetition, and materiality into tools for observing and questioning the present.
