Variscite

Article on SOCKS STUDIO written by Fosco Lucarelli about my La Sentinelle series.

“From Videogame Landscapes to Embrodery Canvas: La Sentinelle by Marine Beaufils (2022-24)
November 17, 2024 by Fosco Lucarelli.Marine Beaufils is a French embroidery artist whose meticulous work draws on the analogy between pixels and needlepoints, as she translates scenes from her favorite video games, movies, or scientific imagery from screen to embroidery canvas. This process freezes a fragment of a larger narrative, converting backlit scenes into a familiar medium that evokes a homey feeling and a vintage aura. The embroidered scenes thus bear an ambiguous quality as they appear suspended between a technological medium and an artisanal practice.In 2022, she began work on La Sentinelle, a series of 14 pieces measuring 55×46 cm, completed in February 2024. Each needlepoint depicts a scene from the video game The Sentinel, created by Geoff Crammond in 1986, and is illuminated in two colors chosen from the game’s original eight-shade palette.
Marine Beaufils describes her creative process as unfolding in two steps. The first step, dreaming, involves closing her eyes to recall scenes from video games— The Sentinel but also Metroid and Maniac Mansion—that sparked her sense of wonder. She remembers the strangeness of crossing these surreal landscapes and then seeks out the original media, whether cartridges or floppy disks. The second step, transcription, is where she translates these scenes onto an embroidery grid. She starts by counting the pixels in width and height, then arranging them on the new grid, initially drawing them in black and white before assigning colors. Once everything is precisely mapped, the meticulous needlepoint work begins.The resulting images evoke a deep nostalgia and sense of wonder, ranging from abstract patterns to surreal landscapes that originated on screen and have landed on the canvas.”

“PIXEL CRAFT
Making dots of light physical, one coloured strand at a time.We’ve seen game-inspired needlecraft before, but never anything quite as striking as French artist Marine Beaufils’ interpretations of Geoff Crammond’s classic, starkly rendered 3D puzzler The Sentinel (pictured right).
“The ZX Spectrum version of The Sentinel uses its palette of eight colours in duo, with black or blue as a common denominator, and this masterful use of colours fascinated me,” Beaufils says of her attraction to honouring the game this way. “I hadn't planned on making a series—embroidery is a long and tedious process —but it was impossible for me to choose among the 13 different duos of colour, so I decided to make them all!”
Beaufils says that her “strongest motivation is the feeling that every videogame is a complex flux of images with many unseen subtleties,” and her creations extend to the static iconography of videogame maps, our favourites being her interpretations of Metroid, bringing new texture to the layout of the series first four instalments.
Pick your own favourites at www.marine.st, where Beaufils also showcases an assortment of non-game creations.”

Cathode Ray Thread

Marine, aka moonovermarine, is a French embroidery artist much of whose work adapts imagery from games, movies, and other cultural wells. Their current project: a series of scenes from the monochrome ZX Spectrum game “Sentinel”.
posted by cortex

Like the memory of a CRT

The Sentinel project is completed. The French artist Marine, aka moonovermarine, has recently completed a beautiful series of 14 embroideries inspired by the video game “The Sentinel” (1986), previously mentioned in MetaFilter. This work of over two years looks fantastic, with a luminous atmosphere and a magnificent rendering of pixels. The color palette is faithful to the game’s chromatic range of the ZX Spectrum.
posted by verylazyminer