Aheneah

Aheneah is the working name of Ana Martins, a Portuguese graphic designer and artist from Vila Franca de Xira. Drawing on the embroidery she learned from her grandmothers, she scales cross-stitch up to building size: thousands of screws driven into a wall form the grid, and kilometres of thread are strung across them. A 2018 piece in her hometown used over 2,300 screws and about 760 metres of thread. Her 2019 work for the Points de Vue festival in Bayonne, a face with closed eyes on allée de Glain, took five people 68 hours and used 14 km of thread and 15,000 screws. Now based in New York, she has been studying for an MFA in Textiles at Parsons School of Design since 2024.