BA2 CLASS READING - TEXTILES IN SOCIETY - KNITTING AS ART GROUP SEMINAR PRESENTATION - this reading is extracts (...) from the set text. 

KNITTING IS ... SABRINA GSCHWANDTNER. 2008.

I started knitting in my final semester of college as an art/semiotics students at Brown University. Two of my roommates were textile students at the Rhode Island School of Design and when they came home late at night, still full of energy, they'd climb onto the yellow stools in our kitchen and chatter and spool yarn toward their needles like addicts. They showed me the basics of knitting and crochet (my mother had taught me when I was eight but I had mostly forgotten) and I was charmed. I started to knit during breaks from the dense theory I was reading for school; stitching, I was completely concentrated on the rhythm of my hands and my frenetic mind would go empty. Within a few months, although I had been rigorously devoted to experimental and avant-garde film during all four years of college, handcraft had become my guiding creative format.

I'd knit or crochet something, leave it, come back, rip it up, fix it, wear it, add some other material, hang it up, leave it, project film onto it, record that, edit it, show it, give it away and start over. Even when I'm not working with knitting as my actual medium or technique I'm still working with it as a single thread out of which emerges a surface, a fabric, a narrative, an outfit, a pattern, a text, a recording, and even, despite my seemingly erratic way of working, a form that encompasses all of these things. ...

The more I worked with handcraft materials, the more I came to think about the social spaces they implied. I swing from making quiet, sculptural spaces to creating sites of conversation. I realized that knitting had potential to reach out to a different audience and that collective crafting and dialogue could be part of the art experience: it could catalyse a different kind of exchange, outside of traditional art boundaries. This reflected a new interest in the public sphere and in creating artwork with social and political components.

I started to think about handicraft as a site of resistance - to an oppressively commodity-based art market and to an omnipresent, excessive, and high-speed communicative landscape - but also as a site of empowerment and activism. Knitting has, after all, become popular during every major American war. During wartime, knitters have used their craft for civic participation, protest, therapeutic distraction, and even direct attack.

For my piece 'Wartime Knitting Circle', an interactive installation created for the Museum of Art and Design's 2007 exhibition 'Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting', I wanted to exploit these different uses of wartime knitting in order to incite political conversation between different kinds of people. Knitters represent a diverse audience group in terms of age, race, politics and economics (for every knitter using qiviut, spun copper, or other high-priced yarns there is a knitters making clothes out of economic necessity). ...

At a 'Stitch In' at the Jersey City Art Museum in October 2007 I gave a short talk about war and handcraft. It concluded with a recollection of someone telling me she thought women did housekeeping/homemaking activities with a kind of irony these days. I asked how the audience felt about that. It really got people going -  everyone has an opinion about their home. One by one people spoke up and their responses ranged from detailed explanations of 1970s fiber art to Martha Stewart's design influence on the marketplace to the agony of making a decision about whether to hire a housekeeper to ideas about post 9/11 nesting. ...


Young artists working with handcraft don't need an art world seal of approval, ... in reevaluating the craft tradition they have emphasized that:


making things by hand is joyful; and
'the functional object is the most interesting one.' (Gschwandtner, 2012, pp.409-418).

REFERENCE

Gschwandtner, S. in Hemmings, J. (ed.) (2012) The textile reader. London: Berg.