Book your slot to attend the artist talk on Saturday 21st of February, at 2:00 PM here. (Free event)
The Love You Left Behind brings together Livia Papiernik’s beautifully crafted world where stitch, story, and imagination intertwine.
A Franco-British mixed-media textile artist, Papiernik is renowned for her extraordinary skill as an embroiderer and her ability to transform cloth into powerful narrative environments. Working primarily with intricate hand embroidery and felted textiles, she creates surreal, story-laden spaces that blur the boundaries between dream and reality. This exhibition invites visitors to step inside those spaces — to wander, pause, and become absorbed in their texture, colour, and quiet magic.
The works on display reveal Papiernik’s mastery of traditional embroidery techniques alongside her experimental approach to scale, surface, and installation. Drawing on folklore, mythology, emotional memory, and landscape, her practice explores themes of identity, grief, wellbeing, and reconnection in response to an increasingly fragmented and digitised world. Each piece functions as a kind of portal: at once beautiful and unsettling, tender and powerful. As well as offering a visually immersive experience, the exhibition provides a rare glimpse into Papiernik’s creative practice. From drawing and writing to intuitive mark-making and painstaking stitch, visitors are invited to engage with embroidery not only as a craft, but as a deeply emotional and sensory medium capable of storytelling, reflection, and care.
Papiernik graduated from the Royal School of Needlework in 2018 and went on to complete an MA in Textiles at the Royal College of Art, where she was awarded the Roger Walls Burns Scholarship. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and her clients include Lock & Co, Huntsman and Sons, Zoffany, Alexander McQueen, and Conrad. Alongside her studio practice, she is a Senior Lecturer at the Royal School of Needlework and co-founder of BOUND, an art collective dedicated to raising the profile of embroidery within the contemporary arts.
To coincide with the exhibition, Livia Papiernik will present an artist talk at Batsford Gallery on Saturday, 21st February, at 2:00 PM, offering audiences an opportunity to hear directly from the artist about her practice, influences, and the making of the work on display.
Download the press release here.
