2026.05.01-31. Floralia ^{One (Bath, UK)}

Curator’s Note for Floralia at One in Bath:
Anna Tuhus learned early that beauty can be an act of quiet defiance. At three years old, she discovered a pink no one had named yet — mixed patiently from blue, yellow, red, and white. Though it was wiped away again and again, she remade it each time, returning to it instinctively, finishing the painting in the colour she knew was right. That pink still lives in her work: the memory of being told not to mix, and choosing to mix anyway.

When she is alone with her materials, she listens for what cannot be said directly. Like embroidery in a play where meaning hides between stitches, her work carries metaphor forward through repetition, texture, and pause. She writes and embroiders what has already happened, letting abstract forms and colour hold stories that language alone cannot. Design offers solutions; her art stays with the question, trusting the silence between answers.

She returns daily to embroidery as one returns to breath. Sometimes a whole surface grows; sometimes only a single thread. Each stitch is measured by her own body — wrist to elbow — time made physical, devotion made small and precise. What draws her back is not fully understood yet, but she trusts it. In this patience lies something quietly radical, echoing the stitched rebellions of those who came before her.

Art gives her the horizon — unreachable, necessary. It offers direction without arrival, desire without possession. That is its gift and its cost: once you know you cannot touch it, you also know you must keep walking toward it.

If her work could whisper to someone standing very close, it would not explain itself. It would remind them, gently, that beneath faith and hope, something more primitive endures. That freedom begins where love does — simple, stubborn, and stitched one thread at a time.

Her work will soon step into shared space. Anna Tuhus' embroidery will be on display and available for viewing from May 1st to May 31st, 2026. The invitation is not to observe from a distance, but to come close — to encounter the tactile language of textile, the uneven rhythm of thread, the honesty of the hand at work. This is "messy" embroidery: not always mindful, not always instinctive, but deeply human. A practice of holding and being held, where touch becomes memory and process becomes presence.