Knitting the sky – Knitted Week
I’ve taken a photo of the sky every morning since Monday with the intention of recreating the mood and colour of the sky through the medium of knitting. I’m not a knitter but it’s proved to be an eye opener. I started off with the bog standard beginner’s knitting stitch but now I want more and have found myself browsing knitting sites searching for new stitches.
Each knitted piece will belong to a frame and I’m looking at displaying them like this… which is to say that I want to mimic the way people hang frames in their home. The way people arrange and display their possessions in their home space is fascinating to me and something I looked at breifly for my MA. I will have to revisit some of the research to help contextualise this project, perhaps it will push it in a new direction.
I miss uni, there was always someone around to give you a hand! I attempted to hang the frame high enough to get a photo of it against the day’s sky but it proved virtually impossible and so frustrating. That’s my guttering you can see top right corner.
It’s a bit of a challenge to produce a piece of knitting each day but I’m getting there. I can visualise what this project will look like when it’s finished; homespun, bland and mundane.
Stephen Fry with Care Bear Head
The blind drawings went well, I decided to use the old wallpaper up and make it life size. This one here was only a ten minute sketch but actually needed longer… more time for detail, but when you are asking people to pose for you, you’re stuck with their time constraints. It almost came out as I had hoped.
I’ve said it before but this method really frees up your hand, in your mind you can visualise what your marks are but it’s always a surprise as to how messy it is when you finally get to look.
I like the way it’s messy. It makes me think of a naughty child’s drawing on the wall. It’s a drawing devoid of responsibility – the knowing mark making process has been removed and replaced with guesswork.
I have two separate pieces developing for this project which is interesting: the blind drawings and the photographic re enactments. Now I have to decide exactly what to do with them. In the past I’ve been prone to over complicate work by exploring too many options, which is really about losing focus. So now I’m out of my comfort zone, time to make decisions and focus back in on what this project is all about and what I want it to be.
Stephen Fry with Care Bear Head
(continued)
It has come to the point where I’m grabbing family members on the off chance that they will pose for me in the bear head, but it’s good I’m not complaining, they are quite willing. This here is Tom, bro in law, and previous model. Just thinking who I can persaude next.
Looks a little spontaneous which is thumbs up, Tim says it captures the spirit of the original pap, I didn’t want it looking staged. I think this is because the photos are taken in the out house in the dark, it was freezing and we were in a rush (as always).
I’m planning on taking as many of these photos as I can, with anyone, and present them in a block/ grid format. It reminds me of Sesame Street’s game ‘one of these people is not like the others’ from way back, where the tv screen was didvided and we had to guess the odd one out.
I don’t believe my work particularly engages with humour but it seems a dirty word in contemporary art, as if it devalues any seriousness or depth. I would have to disagree with that.
Knitting the Sky
(new project)
Blimey it feels like I haven’t added a post for ages now, I got so used to posting every night but it proved unsustainable, just couldn’t keep it up!!
I’ve been pretty busy still, working on the Stephen Fry project, although it’s been stalled a little since I’m having to rely on the availability of friends willing to model.
In the meantime I’ve put a logical hat on and decided to continue with other projects not requiring models, hence Knitting the Sky. This idea was an extension of another I had from the summer (remember when it was warm enough to go out in a t-shirt?):~ take a photo of the sky everyday at the same time for a week then produce a piece/ something knitted in a matching shade from that day.
Off to a good start, I bought lots of wool in shades of blue and this one here matched quite nicely. I say matched, more of a similar shade because in reality that’s completely impossible.
Now I’m thinking looking at a swatch of plain knitting is enough to kill anyone with boredom. It has to be something. In celebration of randomness it came to me that knitting glasses or an eye patch would be interesting. So here are some first attempts. (I’m not convinced…) I’m visualising a self portrait photo against the sky with the glasses/ eye patch.
Then I thought perhaps a full head balaclava to match the sky. It wasn’t until I looked at this photo with the eye patch that I thought of using objects instead – an old school telephone for instance – so there would be a different object each day, knitted and photographed against the sky. Bingo.
Sometimes ideas are little more than instict, currently void of any intellectual depth. That’s OK.
