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.
