Stranded colorwork: Meaning-making through experimental knitting practices

Abstract

Knitting is a common and long-established craft practice. Despite the expressive potential inherent to knitting it has been generally overlooked due to its everydayness. This is problematic because it ignores the agency and skill of its practitioners and limits its creative scope. This thesis presents knitting as a profound practice deserving of critical engagement and welcoming of creative experimentation. To facilitate this shift in perception I suggest an expanded conception of function to amend traditional understandings of knitting and take the craft forward.

The function I turn toward is of a more poetic nature: storytelling. Through representational depictions of everyday life, I explore fleeting moments between comfort and discomfort, and critically reflect on how the narrative is bolstered by the technique it is told with. In the process I focus on three elements that I determined to be central to knitting: in/visibility, tension, and repetition.

Through a theoretical review of knitting, this thesis discusses its historical position as a folk craft existing in the domestic realm. I highlight its relation to care and therapy, and how the practice provides a powerful method for introspective work through the comfort of repetition. Part of this power comes from the opportunity to confront failure at a low threshold, as people who knit know of its potential energy of undoing, the possibility of unravelling inherent to the craft. Through the concept of becoming, I consider the reconfigurability of knitting as its continuously changing position in a flux between yarn and fabric. From a poetic perspective, this thesis presents the basic looped structure as a symbol of personal history, an entangled system of individual and collective.

Following a practice-led research approach I knit stories and experiment with the stitch structure to develop a new sense of aesthetic expression in machine knitting. To do this I focus on the process of making and explore the idea of repetition. Documentation is carried out through photographs and diaries, in the form of text as well as a hand-knit scarf. The making process led up to and was contextualized by an exhibition of machine-knit artifacts.

The examinations on the project proposed the concepts of ‘knittedness’ and ‘pixelness’ as vehicles for expression. Knittedness refers to the entanglement of the work with its process, as well as a way to visualize the world around us. Pixelness describes the stitches inherent to knitting and the notion of creative problem-solving born out of this technical limitation. Through these ideas, the expressivity of knitting appears in unexpected and poignant ways.