Peter Crawley's Order Chaos brings us stitch-tastic textual tangles

Peter Crawley’s a product designer, who also makes beautifully stitch-tastic graphic work on the side. We featured him on the site back in 2011, and his work – largely made using white watercolour paper, needles, and thread – has continued to go from strength to strength. Order Chaos is a recently hand-stitched project, the underlying concept of which will be extremely familiar to anyone who’s ever worked with a sewing box. With the letterforms themselves illustrating the meaning of each opposing word, we see neatly and evenly stitched lines juxtaposed with an absolute tangle of cotton and colour.

Close-up, the images of the “chaos” letters are reminiscent of overgrown gardens, while the “order” forms evoke regulated road and racetrack-markings, providing a sense of progress rather than stagnation. When thrown together, however, the colours used and the sculptural forms generated by the second word render it more striking and perhaps more conducive to creativity… although as I’m more inclined to messiness, I may be biased!