The Hunt for the Unicorn is a series of hand-embroidered samplers that stitch explicit messages from online personals ads into a traditional domestic form. Drawing on historical needlework, the works expose how anonymity, desire, and power play out when intimacy moves online.
Content Note: This work contains explicit sexual language and imagery and addresses themes of anonymity, desire, and power in online spaces.
The Hunt for the Unicorn brings together traditional cross-stitched samplers and the raw, unfiltered language of online desire. Working on fine linen using restrained palettes and blackwork techniques, I stitched messages collected from Craigslist’s now-defunct personals section – texts sent to a fictional profile I created, exploiting the platform’s lack of moderation or verification.
The contrast is deliberate. These works borrow the visual language of care, patience, and domestic virtue, while embedding language shaped by anonymity, entitlement, and fantasy. The Online Disinhibition Effect offered a useful framework at the time: how dissociation and imagined intimacy allow behaviour that would rarely surface offline.
Many of the samplers includes an alphabet – sometimes reordered into QWERTY – alongside QR codes, logos, and imagery that collapse centuries of sexual politics into a single surface. The works are unsettling by design. They ask what happens when private desire becomes public artefact, and when the histories of women’s labour are used to record what was never meant to be preserved.
