Julie Cockburn has a way with names. One of her embroidered vintage portraits of a family is wittily entitled Close Knit. Another of her pieces is called The Adulterer: “I found an old oil-painting portrait of a horrible looking man who just looked so sleazy. By the time I was finished, his face had completely disappeared – but his character reappeared in the title.”  Cockburn trawls eBay, flea markets and car boot sales for discarded photography, which she embroiders in a variety of styles: vibrant geometric patterns, wild freeform stitching, and a cut-up-and-reassemble technique using Photoshop to transform faces into kaleidoscopic collages. Her new series, Waiting Room, is currently on show at Flowers East in London – and it is a strange, beautiful set of encounters with a bold, meticulous mind.  Cockburn hunts mainly for studio portraits and landscapes photographed from the 1930s to the 60s. “After that time, something happens to photographs,” she says, “maybe because more people have cameras and no longer go to studio photographers. With studio portraits, there’s a certain enforced naturalness that I can work with. Plus, many of them are beautiful objects to begin with, hand-coloured and beautifully composed. That’s what I’m looking for: stillness and a kind of blank poise.”  The work for which she is best known sees anonymous faces from the past encased in spirals or cubes of coloured thread, or completely stitched over in circles and ovals. Her attention to detail is staggering. “It’s slow, meticulous work,” Cockburn says. “A single piece can take days, and some take a whole lot more days than others ... but that doesn’t necessarily show in the finished work.”  She points towards some large pieces at the far end of the gallery, which look from afar as if they’ve been quickly scribbled in Tippex. One is called The Family Outing. The bodies of the family in question are barely visible walking down a country road, but their faces have been obliterated then redrawn as childlike squiggles. On closer inspection, some of the scribbles are oil paint and some are sewn in silvery-white thread. “It may look like a big childlike scribble,” she says, “but it has been done meticulously.”  In an age when the found photograph has become central to recontextualised image-making, from John Stezaker’s collages to Erik Kessels’ mischievous celebration of the vernacular photograph, finding the right kind of portrait, Cockburn says, has become “like searching for gold dust”.  Like Stezaker, as well as Maurizio Anzeri and Carolle Benitah who also embroider old photographs, her work has a surrealist quality – not least when she completely conceals faces or imprisons them in thread cages. She dislikes the term “defacement”, which has been applied to her work in the past. “I love the old portraits I find, and I do think hard about turning them into something new.” Indeed, there is something almost reverent about her works’ handcrafted delicacy.  Given that the majority of her pieces are one-offs, does she discard a lot along the way? “No, my success rate is pretty good,” she says. “If something niggles at me, I do unstitch or recut it or, if it was really ill-conceived, discard it. That makes it sound incredibly painstaking, and it is. But I really love doing it. Work has to be fun.”
Julie Cockburn takes studio portraits from the past, obliterates the faces with embroidery – and injects them with new life. Sean O’Hagan meets her