Meet the embroidery artist bringing Finnish landscape to life

“When I’m excited to create something, I can’t sleep. I can be working many hours, day and night, because there's a fire inside of me, which I can’t put down,” says Russian-born, Finland-based embroidery artist Polina Laamanen. This fire was ignited within Laamanen at a tender age as she closely watched her mum work as a seamstress for a theatre in St. Petersburg. “When I was little my mum would take me to her work,” she explains. “I had my Barbie doll with me and there were some scraps of fabric, from which I started making clothes for my Barbie. That’s where I started.”

Crafting creations for her Barbie soon expanded into exploring her skills in knitting, crocheting and felting, all of which laid the foundation for her later foray into embroidery. While she maintained her art as a beloved hobby, Laamanen studied as a chemical engineer, gaining prowess that turned out to be rather handy when she made the move to become a full-time embroidery artist in 2016. “It brought the possibility to experiment and look at materials in many different ways,” the 32-year-old says. “The embroidery technique I’m using, I developed it myself – it’s unique. Nobody is doing things the way I do them.”

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Calling her approach “volume embroidery”, Laamanen combines the various knitwork techniques she masters, using textiles and fibres to recreate objects found in nature, her most significant source of inspiration. As Laamanen explains her method, her training as a chemical engineer creeps up again. “For each shape that I make, I paint the background and I use fire to bend it to make it look more realistic. Then I add details using stitches and embroidery,” she says.

The result? 3D-like pieces so meticulously detailed it’s astonishing to think they’ve been created by hand. Nordic nature is Laamanen's biggest muse, and her work often features botanical gems such as Arctic berries, flowers and plants found in our unique environment. “In Finland, the love and affection for nature, that people enjoy being outside picking berries, it’s so amazing,” says Laamanen, who has now lived in Tikkurila, a town near Helsinki, for three years. “I think [being in] Finland has brought me to the point where I want to enjoy each moment of my life and really feel the things around me.”

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But perhaps above all else, what Laamanen enjoys the most in her work is the challenge it provides. “Creativity is the bravery to do something new. I want to make the world more beautiful,” she muses. “When I experiment, I challenge myself and think: can I actually imitate this branch and the leaves? How could I replicate this exact flower?” For Laamanen, her Vogue debut is the most significant achievement in her careerso far. “It's amazing,” she says. “It’s a very warming feeling for me that my work was noticed by such a respected magazine. I’m very pleased.”