Global warming...

I have been busy - but today, the last day of Spring Break, I finally found some time to post these images from our recent 4- person Faculty Show, Oddly Wound Up at the Lawton gallery earlier this semester.  These works are a continuation of the bathing suits, of which I've posted a couple here previously.  This is a set of 5 knitted bikinis designed to follow specific locational knitting traditions; maps and ephemeral research materials are displayed on bulletin boards behind the suits, so people can see where the traditions came from, and get a sense of what the weather might be like in a place where knitting would become a really solid part of the cultural identity - and how global warming could threaten the production of material culture.

If you're from a really small remote place yourself, you'll probably enjoy the fact that Fair Isle is a tiny place in the middle of the North Sea, but their knitting traditions are still prominently represented in fashion today.

Cowichan bikini, "The Dude" based upon native interpretations of Fair Isle knitting brought over from Europe by the Sisters of St. Anne in 1860.

 Aran, Guernsey Gansey and Fair Isle 'kinis.

 Aran installed next to Cowichan, with maps mounted behind each.

 Guernsey Gansey Tankini with Fair Isle string and Nordkini in background.

Guernsey Gansey Tankini and Fair Isle share a map.

Nordkini.

Map and Nordkini.

Highlighting the Fair Isle String, inspired by Elizabeth Zimmermann, and the Guernsey Gansey Tankini, instructions and visuals from "Knitting the Old Way."

Aran and Cowichan. 

Map dots, ephemera highlighted. 

Just showing off the skirt on the Fair Isle string - Okay, I'm pretty proud of that one. And it was fun to make! 

Stabbing, cutting, boiling, slashing, ripping and burning

Today one of my students confessed an attraction to a particular scene in Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides.  "When I read about the girl who baked rat poison into the pie and then her grandmother ate it I couldn't stop laughing." It's only funny in context - the girl had meant to commit suicide and instead had committed homicide. This led to a discussion of a calendar my mom gave me a couple Christmases ago - Edward Gorey's Neglected Murderesses.  My favorite murderess was December - a woman stabbed her daughter-in-law to death with a crochet hook, then used the hook to craft the dead woman's shroud in a snowflake pattern.  Death in textiles is a pretty common thing - Freddie Robbin's Knitted Homes of Crime is a good contemporary example, but there's a lot of death portrayed in the Bayeux Tapestry too - headlessness, impaled horses, really bloody kinds of death.  And what better place to portray violence than in a textile?  After all, everything textile art is, is made with a sharp and pointed object - we wield blades, stab at fabric and yarn, boil pots of color up with caustic solutions and acids, rip stuff up, spend hours twisting and tying and manipulating things to our will. And for those who are faced with a mystery fiber, there's always that search for a match - set it on fire and the make-up of any yarn is revealed. Just yesterday I found a photograph I'd purchased of a man shearing a sheep - one wonders if this is where Sweeney Todd got all his ideas about how to make a man into a pie?

Anyway, there's much research to be done on why in particular women do this sort of thing, and why men in particular often show a tendency to feel uncomfortable in the Textiles studio. Is it that it's too girly, or is it that they prefer violence as a spectator sport?  And why does it bother my spouse when I knit during NFL games on television?