I learned how to knit when I was 8 years old. Every Wednesday I would go to a lesson at my neighbor’s house and knit for two hours, which seemed like an eternity at the time. I began to dread these lessons; I struggled to follow patterns and messed up all the time and hated sitting in silence. I also felt resentful that my older brother wasn’t required to take these lessons like I was. After finishing my first hat, my mom finally let me quit.
My work today attempts to reconcile my 8 year old self with the craft of knitting. Through creating and warping my own knitted textiles, my work addresses the absence and presence of autonomy in my own life. I often feel like I had no control in my choice to knit, and now have no control over how I am viewed as a female artist who knits. The origin of my work was to fabricate a feeling of autonomy through developing my own language and style of knit. My intention is to undermine traditional ideas of knitting as a feminine and domestic craft, and instead use it as a means of asserting my own artistic control and challenging social expectations. In “Taking Shape”, I take knitted pieces and manipulate and stretch them to create an immersive installation space. The space consists of twisted grid and cobweb-like structures that are tethered to the walls, ceilings, and floors of a gallery. By warping and suspending my textiles, I am attempting to stretch knitting beyond what is traditionally accepted as a legitimate “product” of the craft. I have created a language for myself by breaking patterns and morphing lifeless textiles into unique figures with relationships and connectivity to the world around them. The language is color-coded, tactile and patternless.
The installation pieces are accompanied by paintings with hand-knit textiles sewn into them and then encoded into the canvas with gesso and oil paint, giving the effect of skin stretched over canvas. The addition of my paintings are just another way in which to control how my textiles are perceived by the public. My hope is that I have created an environment that forces my audience to view textile making through my eyes and my language, and helps them to question the gendered and domestic associations of knitting.
