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.
