November 22, 2009
Shit We're Diggin': The Art of Jen Grant
Artist Statement:
"SWING was created from discarded items of clothing collected from the back alleys and bin areas of tenements in Glasgow. The clothes were then laundered and dried, cut into strips, and woven together to fashion ropes, to which parts of chairs (also found on the streets) were attached to form swings. These were hung from the guardrails on the Botanic Gardens Bridge that crosses the river Kelvin and forms part of the busy Kelvin Walkway.
The clothes that were collected and used for this project were imbued with a personality and invoked very powerfully notions of the abject, each piece telling a story of sorts, albeit ambiguously, about its previous owners and their lives and experiences. The cutting and braiding together of these items seemed almost like weaving together small fragments of narratives from the lives of a myriad of unknown people, creating an object that at once juxtaposes these fragments while creating a new narrative of its own."
To see more of Jen's projects, click here.
Posted by marc at 7:14 AM in Crafivism | Recommend this! |
| July 21, 2009
Yarnstorming - An Introduction to Knit The City
To find out more about Knit The City, click here.
Posted by marc at 7:57 AM in Crafivism | Recommend this! (14) |
January 12, 2009
Radical Cross Stitch's "QRacks in the Land"
"I’ve been working on stitching QR Codes for some time now. I’ve been doing them on regular Aida fabric (14 count mostly) and they’ve been working really well. So I decided to do it large scale. This project was stitched with black and white finger knitted wool and stitched on animal fencing (which is tough to work with but has a lovely strong and square grid).
QR Codes, or Quick Response Codes are an open source mobile phone read bar code type technology which originated from Japan (download the free reader here). While the Japanese tend to use QR codes for communicating public service information ie public transport timetables. The introduction of QR Codes to Australia has largely been based in advertising (ugh).
So I’ve been working QR Codes in cross stitch as a way of exploring non-corporate alternatives to this potentially very interesting and useful communication medium.
The piece designed for The Streets of Melbourne is designed to make a very clear statement on the irony of a privately owned and operated city square. A space that, within Western culture, has traditionally been the primary space for free speech. And of course this space in particular is part of the traditional gathering grounds for the people of the Kulin Nations.
It is to the Kulin Nations that this piece, QRacks in the Land, is dedicated."
Posted by marc at 7:30 AM in Crafivism | Recommend this! (18) |