Bruno Vinhas
Textile Artist & Curator
Stitch by Stitch:
A visual journey through memory
A year-long self reflecting project on one's journey in becoming an artist
Month 1 - Beginings
September 2025
A month ago, I began an embroidery project: 1 hour a day, every day, for 365 days. What started as a creative habit quickly revealed itself as something deeper: a quiet, meditative journey back to myself.
Though I’m still creating odd small things, I realize now that I was yearning for something more: a long-term project with meaning, something to anchor me. This piece holds a special place in my heart, not just because of the time invested, but because of what it’s helping me process.
The past two years came with many changes in life: Job. New routines. Grief.Loss of friendships I thought were real. Family. Realizations of current time and days of yore. And through all of that, I kept moving forward, barely pausing to look back or reflect. I accepted the place I was in, even if it didn’t feel like mine.
But this embroidery project is becoming something sacred; a space to reflect, to breathe, to remember why I became an artist in the first place.
This first month’s work is an ode to my theater life, where my creative journey began. A time when I first felt like I belonged. A sense of community that built in me the need to give and to help, through art, those around me. Every play, every light cue, every costume, every pattern cut in old newspaper (a technique my grandma thought me and I use to this day) all of it made me feel alive, seen, part of something.
Each stitch is a memory. Each thread, a story. And every hour I spend with the needle is an act of remembering who I am, and reclaiming it.
Month 2 - Roots
October 2025
This project began in September: one hour of embroidery a day, every day, for 365 days. What started as a creative discipline has slowly become something deeper — a quiet, meditative journey back to myself.
In Month 2, I’ve been exploring the roots of my colours, patterns, and textures; tracing them back to where I grew up: a coastal city in a tropical country, shaped by the painful legacy of colonialism, yet pulsing with the vibrant traditions of Native Brazilians and African descendants.
From a young age, I absorbed the rhythms, food, sounds, and spirituality of Candomblé woven into daily life. It wasn’t until my grandfather passed that I consciously reconnected with that cultural and spiritual side, searching for myself through grief.
That belief system has lived within me ever since. Coming from a mixed background :African, Native, and European, and identifying as queer, Candomblé gave me a voice I never thought possible.
The rhythms, colours, movements, smells, and textures of African tribes, once forcibly brought together through enslavement on the terra brasilis,created a cultural tapestry that still lives on. It runs through my veins and flows into my embroidery. When I stitch from that place, I feel the deepest connection to my ancestry and to the strongest work I’ve ever made.
Stitch by stitch, thread by thread — I keep finding myself again
Month3 - Langauge
November 2025
Three months into this 365-day experiment, and I’m realizing something: this project may have begun with embroidery, but it keeps leading me back to the person I have always been.
Before I ever held a needle, I held books. I grew up a devoted bookworm : the geek kid who lived between stories in a library corner, who fell in love with metaphors before understanding what they were, who scribbled poems and short stories in every margin.
Literature was my first home, long before I left my actual one. I was fascinated not just by stories, but by how they were told; literary movements, writing styles, the magic of figures of speech… I carried those in my pocket or bags everywhere I went! Those rhythms and textures shaped how I saw the world.
In university I discovered the passion for research, a different writing style that opened doors to understand the past, the future, the present of generations of yore and yet to come. A trait that I carry with me to this date. I became the first person in my university course to write a graduation thesis: another thread added to the pattern.
Then came the part where I had to leave my mother tongue behind. Suddenly, the language in which I had won poetry and playwriting writing prizes back home, the language in which my short stories were studied in high school classes, felt like a secret no one here could read. I had spent years building a voice, only to be told it didn’t “sound English enough.” I had to defend my knowledge out loud, explaining that I wasn’t incapable… just translating myself, slowly, imperfectly. Over time, piece by piece, I learned how to write in a foreign language without losing my own style.
And now, all of that history, the reading, the writing, the language, the fight for a voice, appears again, stitched into cloth.
Each embroidery piece this month ( and in the past 10y of living in Canada) has felt like a quiet metaphor, a translated poem, a visual figure of speech. My needle moves the same way a sentence forms: pausing, flowing, revising, layering meaning. Every day’s one hour of stitching has become a return to that literary kid, that storyteller, that person who believed deeply in the power of language.
Month 3 reminds me that creativity is never a single art form. It’s a continuum: threads from different chapters tying themselves together in ways I never expected.
Month 4 - Longing
March 2026
Several things happened and delayed this post and the finishing of month 4 piece. Four months into this 365-day experiment, and I’m realizing something: this project may have begun with embroidery, but it keeps leading me back to the quiet spaces between leaving and becoming.
This month begins with saudade and departure, two threads that feel inseparable. The piece I stitched carries the image of the last place I saw before leaving my hometown, a fleeting landscape held between movement and stillness, between who I was and who I was about to become.
Longing is a strange feeling. It arrives unannounced, settles somewhere deep, and lingers. Yet it grounds me, whether in memory or in the present moment. Remembering feels like breathing: an unconscious return to where I come from and the reasons why I ever chose to leave.
There is a particular kind of silence in departure, especially in that last plane ride leaving my city. It held a sense of rupture, but also of quiet possibility. In that suspended moment, somewhere above everything I had known, I felt the beginning of something else: a restart, a reassembling, a slow construction of the person I am still becoming today.
Saudade lives in that space. It is both loss and discovery, absence and presence. It is the feeling of losing oneself and, at the same time, the fragile, persistent act of finding oneself again.
And now, all of that, the leaving, the longing, the remembering, appears again, stitched into cloth. My needle moves the way memory does: returning, hesitating, tracing familiar paths while creating new ones.
Month 4 reminds me that identity is not fixed. It is something we carry, lose, and rebuild, stitch by stitch, across distance and time.
Month 5 - Grief
June 2026
Month 5 is about grief.
Not the sharp, immediate grief that arrives with a loss, but the kind that settles quietly into the fabric of who we are. It changes shape over time, softening at the edges, transforming as we move through life, yet never fully leaving. It remains present, sometimes hidden, waiting for an unexpected invitation to surface again through a memory, a familiar scent, a phrase overheard, or a fleeting image.
This month's piece became a way of giving grief a temporary form. Art has a way of naming what often resists language, even if only for a moment before dissolving back into the body. Through making, I found myself tracing the contours of something both deeply personal and universally human.
Grief reminds me of an hourglass that never stops releasing sand. The weight of the "big feelings" slowly shifts, making room for quieter memories and gentler reflections. Nothing disappears; it simply transforms as it passes through us, becoming part of our inner landscape.
The process of stitching this piece reflected that transformation. Much of the work relied on French knots, a repetitive, slow, and time-consuming technique. Each knot required the same sequence of movements, repeated over and over again, accumulating almost imperceptibly until a larger image emerged. In many ways, grief feels similar. It is made of small moments that gather over time: memories revisited, emotions returning, absences noticed anew. The repetition can feel endless, yet it is through that persistence that meaning begins to take shape.
As my hands moved through the rhythm of knot after knot, I thought about how grief asks for patience. It cannot be rushed or completed. Like embroidery, it unfolds in its own time, building itself through countless small gestures of remembering, feeling, and carrying on.
Month 5 reminds me that grief is not something to overcome but something to live alongside. It becomes woven into our stories, appearing and reappearing in different forms, stitched quietly into the fabric of our lives, knot by knot, memory by memory.
Month 6 - Becoming
July 2026
Month 6 is about pride and becoming.
Created during Pride Month, this piece holds my journey of coming out, accepting myself as a gay person in a family where that truth felt forbidden, finding community through isolation, losing people I thought I’d never lose, discovering love, and learning that I could live openly, freely, and authentically.
It grew from hope, that lil sprout between dream and reality, and the belief that life could become fuller if I embraced who I truly was. Looking back, even the fear, the cruelty, and the rejection carried the seeds of growth.
Hidden beneath the embroidery is the letter I wrote to my family when I came out, a letter they never read. Years later, while packing to leave, I found it again. Now it rests beneath every stitch, forming the foundation of this work, just as that moment continues to shape me.
Each stitch, a quiet meditation, helped me process what words could not, offering space to heal, breathe, and keep moving forward.
The lace carries its own history. Once a symbol of beauty and luxury, it also represents the freedom of the hidden queer spaces of yesteryears where people found refuge, connection, and the power to exist when the world denied them. Those unseen places stitched resilience into generations that followed.
Together, these layers honour the past, the love I’ve found over the last decade, the people who stayed, and the life I continue to build with pride. Like every piece in this journey, it is stitched together one memory, one scar, and one hopeful thread at a time.
Month 7 - Vulnerability
August 2026
Month 7 is about vulnerability, mental health, and learning to understand myself with compassion.
This month, I am revisiting a period in my life that changed my relationship with embroidery and, perhaps more importantly, changed the way I understood mental health.
During the first year of the pandemic, I began living with what I now understand as high-functioning depression. I was working, creating, staying busy and showing up...but underneath that surface, I was struggling to understand what was happening to me.
From that experience came *When It Stopped*, one of the most powerful bodies of work I have created. Not because it was technically perfect or received attention, but because making it became a deeply cathartic process of creation, exploration and understanding. The anatomical forms, embroidery, threads and knots became a visual language for the complexity of living with something that could not always be seen, they gave form to thoughts and feelings that were difficult to articulate.
The work also made me confront how invisible disabilities, particularly those connected to mental health, are still misunderstood, minimized or left unspoken. We often see the beautiful surface of someone’s life without seeing what is happening underneath; much like an embroidery piece where the front can appear composed while the back reveals a tangled network of threads and knots. Each stitch became a quiet meditation. A way to slow down, process, breathe and begin making sense of a period I was still learning to understand myself.
Revisiting this work has been an important part of my journey. It has allowed me to look back at a version of myself I did not always respect with more compassion, care and love.
It has reminded me that becoming an artist is not only about making things. Sometimes, it is about using the act of making to understand ourselves, to survive difficult moments, and eventually, to learn how to love ourselves again.
This month, I am returning to the threads,but also to the person who first picked up the needle.
