The Knitting Books: Red Knit Book
Cair Crawford. The Knitting Books: Red Knit Book, 2010–2011.
Description:
Red Knit Book (Red Sea) - lake with liquid fire, 108 pages.
The Knit Books are color coded and drawn out in a handwritten, wave-like life script. Each story is one of split-identity, balancing between detachment and intensity and between biographical elements and formal aesthetic properties. Time is woven into the work and the work is imbued with the body language of the maker. When called upon to subvert her role, she leaves behind a trail of concerns.
The Knit Books are produced by an obsessively enigmatic logic, that gives new form to a cliche of everyday culture and to defined roles of female art making.
Knitting/writing is as much a convention as it is a taboo. In the history of knitting, early fragments have Arabic written into them. This tradition, which commemorates religious, social, and political views, is essentially a subversive activity. In social history, knitting was a means to treat hysteria and depression; to give women a creative purpose and to keep women productively occupied.
See: Turney, Joanne. The Culture of Knitting. Berg Publishers, 2009.
Galloway, Anne.? "Knitting and Public Politics." August 8, 2006.
http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org
Medium:
Book
Tags:
hysteria., subversive knitting, repetition, book, pattern, narrative, conceptual, meditation
Previous
Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
