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Get Knitted At Sheffield's Millennium Gallery Gets Us Thinking
By Sophie Allen
07/07/2008
Image: A photograph of a wedding dress made from wool
Rachel Matthews and Cast Off, The Knitted Wedding, 2005. Courtesy Millennium Galleries, Sheffield
With Get Knitted, Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery continues its run of unusual exhibitions by putting a modern spin on traditional British craft and design. After showcasing silverwork and mapmaking, gallery staff are now turning their attention to the humble art of knitting.
This small exhibition explores the versatility of this craft through an eclectic selection of objects which don’t often seem to have much in common beyond the techniques used. For example, the range of items in the collection includes knitting patterns, an haute couture dress and a chair made from knitted tyres.
Folk art is a key influence for several of the designers involved. Rebecca Holmes’ Down Mexico Way is a series of elaborately decorated blankets and hangings. These were inspired by the saddle decorations of South American cowboys. Meanwhile, Shane Waltener’s Garlands, made with the help of local Sheffield residents, are wonderfully chaotic webs of yarn. These echo Native American dreamcatchers.
In complete contrast there is Jemma Sykes’ knitted designer dress, titled On the Inside. Here the intricacy and skill involved in knitting is accentuated to show how it can be used to create beautiful and complex clothes as well as good old woolly jumpers.
Tait and Style, a knitwear company based on the Orkney Islands, combine the traditional knitting techniques of the Scottish northern isles with contemporary designs. Their pieces in the exhibition include the Fairheart Knitted Horse, a quirky take on the knitted soft toy.
The Cast Off Knitting Club for Boys and Girls, a group that stages public knitting events to raise the profile of knitting as a hobby, takes this sense of fun even further. With tongue firmly in cheek they present The Knitted Wedding. This includes a knitted wedding dress (complete with train) as well as a woolly wedding cake, bottle of champagne and sandwiches. But it goes further than this: all of these items were made for the actual wedding of knitwear designer, Freddie Robins.
Image: A photograph of a seating system made of rubber and wool
Samantha Williams, Second Skin Modular Seating System, 2007. Rubber car tyres, Shetland wool. Courtesy Sheffield's Millennium Gallery
Cast Off’s humour is often gently subversive, playing with people’s perception of knitting as a safe, domestic activity. Their hand grenade purse, entitled Drop Stitches Not Bombs, shows how crafts can be used for political messages while cleverly referencing the tradition of women knitting socks for soldiers. This exhibit take particular pleasure in using the sense of cosiness we associate with knitted objects to surprise and subtly challenge their audience. And if the grenade purse isn't enough to surprise, their is also an alarmingly homely knitted penis on show.
Perhaps recognising that many visitors might themselves be knitters, the main focal point of Get Knitted is Shane Waltener’s artwork in process, Knitting Piece #15 Anyone who comes to the gallery can help to create this item. The piece is essentially a tube of knitting which four people can work on at the same time. This causes the stitches to gradually move around the circle.
Even on the exhibition’s opening day Knitting Piece #15 had already suffered a fair number of dropped stitches. The point is not however to create a perfect piece of knitting. Instead the intention is to highlight the way knitting, more so than any other craft, has always been a peculiarly social activity.
Waltener draws on the idea that by knitting together people create opportunities to talk and exchange stories. Yet just as important is the potential for collaboration. The joint effort requires people to pick up where others have left off and build upon their work.
Get Knitted looks at the diverse associations surrounding knitting and celebrates it as both an exclusive art form and as a truly democratic pastime in which anyone can take part. By putting knitting in the spotlight, the Millennium Gallery is acknowledging the remarkable resurgence in recent years of this enduring craft and this varied exhibition makes an activity so often dismissed as old fashioned seem refreshingly relevant.
Millennium Galleries
Millennium Galleries, Arundel Gate, Sheffield, Sheffield, S1 2PP, South Yorkshire, England
Open: Monday - Sat, 10 am - 5pm
Sunday 11am - 5pm
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