These Artists Are Giving Knitting a

Place in Art History

ARTSY EDITORIAL
BY ALEXXA GOTTHARDT
JAN 25TH, 2017 10:01 PM
https://www.ar tsy.net/ar ticle/ar tsy-editorial-ar tists-knitting-place-ar t-histor y , ACCESAT 27. 01. 2017.

Subversive knitting. Radical crocheting. These phrases may

sound contradictory, but marrying craft to cool has
become commonplace in the last decade, as once-dowdy
domestic hobbies have metamorphosed into trendy pastimes
for the creative set. (Think knitting-focused
Instagram accounts that draw hundreds of thousands of
followers, and viral articles featuring knitted pajamas for
chilly elephants.) In this atmosphere, the art world, too, has
seen an uptick in the use of knitting and crocheting as a
medium. But this is by no means a new phenomenon among
artists.
As early as the 1970s and 80s, artists like Louise Bourgeois,
Faith Wilding, and Rosemarie Trockel employed knitting and
crocheting as both a material and a feminist tool, connecting
the history of craft as womens work to that of repressive
domesticity. Since then, countless contemporary artists have
built on the work of these feminist pioneers, using knitting
and crocheting to mine a wide range of themes. Below, we
highlight eight creatives that prove knitting and crocheting
can be boundary-pushing, politically charged mediums.
Haegue Yang

Haegue Yang
Female Natives: No. 3 Saturation out of Season , 2010
Seattle Art Museum

Haegue Yang
 Cup Cosies, For Parkett 89, 2011
Parkett

Yang builds her mesmerizing, delightfully absurd sculptures

from everyday objects ranging from frosted lightbulbs to hair
rollers to fake plants to hand-knitted cosies. While not all of
her works incorporate knitted and crocheted elements,
allusions to craft and homemade trinkets appear across her
oeuvre. When paired with industrial materials and
commercial products like clothing racks, Venetian blinds, and
canned goods, they become icons for contradictory feelings
of belonging and alienation, safety and suffocation that
domestic life can inspire. These are dichotomies with which
Yang, who splits her time between Seoul and Berlin, is
intimately familiar, and they emerge in big, immersive works
like Sallim (2009), an abstract reimagining of her Berlin
kitchen, and Cup Cosies (2011), as well as a cohort of small
plastic cups blanketed with knitted covers.

Orly Genger

 Orly Genger
Red, 2013
Madison Square Park

Gengers crocheted sculptures are most succinctly described

as monumental. For a 2013 public installation in New York
Citys Madison Square Park, she looped and stitched 1.4
million feet of lobster-fishing rope into immense, meandering
forms that, from afar, resemble outdoor sculptures by
modernist male greats, like Claes Oldenburg or Richard Serra.
But there is one key difference: Genger uses a technique
traditionally associated with women and craft. This is the crux
of the American artists practice, which reimagines, enlarges,
and subtly lampoons big, hard-edged works made by men. In
this way, Genger draws an approach oft-described as
womens work away from a domestic environment and
emphatically plants it in the public sphere.

Stephan Goldrajch

 Stephan Goldrajch
Frederique, 2008
Johannes Vogt Gallery

 Stephan Goldrajch
Knit Mask, 2014
Johannes Vogt Gallery

 Stephan Goldrajch
Myriam, 2011
Johannes Vogt Gallery

Goldrajchs crocheted masks investigate central themes of

his practice: the impact of hierarchical terms like insider
and outsider, and high and low, on the art world. The
Israeli, Brussels-based artist fuses a technique traditionally
associated with craft (one still struggling for art-world
legitimacy) with subjects drawn from the paintings of
celebrated artists, like James Ensor, whose work hangs on
walls of big-name institutions. In this way, Goldrajch brings to
light limiting prejudicestoward certain materials and artists
that institutions and traditions often reinforce.

Jim Drain

Jim Drain
LFSVR, 2004
Paul Bright

Drain began knitting as a student at RISD in Providence, a

city that was once the center of the American textile industry.
Since then, hes incorporated both knitting and embroidery
into his diverse sculptural practice in order to synthesize the
history of craft and artmaking with contemporary culture and
technology. Sweaters patterned to resemble pixelated 1980s
video games and early computer iconography tap into the
proliferation, and obsoletion, of new trends and innovations.
Drain has also embedded knitted elements into multimedia
sculptures. Their angular patterns, made from uniform webs
of yarn, at once refer to the networked, viral nature of
contemporary technology and the undying human desire for
physical comfort.

Olek

 Olek
Catch Me If You Can, 2011
Jonathan LeVine Gallery

 Olek
Crocheted Object - Bicycle, 2010
Robert Fontaine Gallery

The Polish, New York-based artist, who goes simply by Olek,

has crocheted potent political messagesboth overt and
subliminalacross city streets since 2002. To underline the
importance of expression and play, no matter the
environment, she has covered bicycles and carousels in hand-
crocheted, neon-hued sheaths, as well as dressing people up
in her textiles. She also uses her work to communicate urgent
social issues, from free speech to refugee relief to womens
rights. Case in point: during last years election cycle, she
crocheted a 16-by-46-foot banner, which was tacked to a New
Jersey highway billboard, depicting Hillary Clintons face and
the candidates viral hashtag #imwithher. In the last month,
shes also created anti-racism and feminist messages on
public walls (a quote from Martin Luther King Junior in
Londons Shoreditch neighborhood) and on protest signs
(Love Always Wins at the Womens March on Washington)
all with her trademark threads.

Ernesto Neto

 Ernesto Neto
The Sacred Live On Us, Light, 2015
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

 Ernesto Neto
Untitled, 2012
Galerie Bob van Orsouw

Brazilian artist Netos immense installations resemble giant

swollen body parts, aroused sexual organs, and gooey,
dripping stalactites. And he achieves their organic, fluid
contours by suspending sprawling networks of crocheted
yarn, weighed down with heavy objects like glass balls, from
tall ceilings. Across his body of work, loosely-woven,
crocheted and knitted sheaths allude to cellular structures,
human skin, or celestial constellations. Other sculptures draw
on the history of craft and culture in his native Brazil by
embedding objects from everyday life, like beer cans and
green coconuts, into webs dyed to conjure the vibrant colors
of Rio de Janeiros streets. In this way, Neto explores the
connections between molecular science, human life, and the
overarching cosmosfrom the micro to the macro.

Johanna Jackson

 Johanna Jackson
A ship in the snow, 2015
Fleisher/Ollman
Jackson is interested in the role of objects in a good life, as
shes explained. She makes non-traumatized objects that
fuse craft mediums, like knitting and crocheting, with symbols
representing nature, joy, and other calming, comforting
forces. Both her materials and the images and garments she
forges from themblankets covered in icons of a waning and
waxing moon, sweaters embedded with serene illustrations of
the sea or baskets of fruitallude to the soothing power of
the natural world, one that contemporary cultures tend to
ignore in favor of technology and industry. She also lends her
self-taught knowledge of textiles and knitting to the
collaborative furniture she makes with her husband,
painter Chris Johanson. Like the rest of her work, these chairs
and couches are meant to be lived with, worn, and nestled
into.

Caroline Wells Chandler

 Caroline Wells Chandler
Molly Wearing Katherine Bradford's Magic Glasses, 2016
DANESE/COREY

Caroline Wells Chandler
 Under Construction (YMCA Orgin), 2015
ROBERTO PARADISE

Chandler uses the graphic quality of the crocheted technique

(whose stitches create blocks of color and hard-edged
patterns) in order to emphasize certain physical
characteristics of her smiling, cartoonish subjects. In Rainbow
Bright (2015), for instance, the thick, rainbow-hued lines that
underline two red nipples signal that the character has
undergone a double mastectomy, perhaps as part of a sex
change. Observed closely, many of Chandlers figures proudly
bear the marks of gender reassignment or joyfully resist rigid
genders. Both the subjects in Erica (2015) and Under
Construction (2015) are decorated with vertical lines where a
penis or vagina might be, which could read as either, both, or
simply a colorful undergarment. Her use of crocheting, a
hobby associated with female domesticity, further
emphasizes her celebration of gender subversion.

Alexxa Gotthardt