2001 Knitting, hand embroidery, machine embroidery and heat transfer on found domestic linen. 
150 × 125 mm – 240 × 920 mm 
Private collection.

Lot 1189 Eighteen coloured table mats, fringed, and a quantity of d’oyleys, odd serviettes and pieces of linen.

At the back of most linen or airing cupboards you will probably find these eighteen coloured table mats, a quantity of d’oyleys, odd serviettes and pieces of linen. These items were once essential to every household but are now mostly redundant. I will look at their supposed function and the role that they played in every woman’s life. So much stitching, washing, starching, pressing and storing. These items represent so many hours of hard work and to what end? I often use word games to further my ideas and will employ this technique to come up with other forms that these textile items might take.

PIECES OF LINEN

PIECES OF LENIN

In response to all of this I will produce a series of contemporary textile pieces which, like the list above, may form a rather motley assortment of items which have come together through chance rather than intention. I will use both old and new materials, incorporating traditional techniques such as knitting, stitching and embroidery. (Statement taken from proposal for “A Public Auction of Private Art Works”, 2001) www.somewhere.org.uk/auction

Mat Fraser wears “SHORT ARMED AND DANGEROUS”

2000
Machine knitted wool

730 × 480 mm

Catherine Long wears “AT ONE”
2001
Machine knitted wool, hand embroidered cotton yarn
460 × 400 mm

Commissioned by The City Gallery, Leicester
for Adorn, Equip, an exhibition discussing issues surrounding design and disability.

BODY 
NO BODY 
S0ME BODY 
ANY BODY

Wordplay formed the basis of these two commissions made for, and in conjunction with, Mat Fraser and Catherine Long. Strong, confrontational wording with an element of humour and the unexpected.

Disability has long been the butt of jokes. I can remember the one about the one legged, one armed man who was getting on the bus and the bus conductor said to him, “Hop on, you look (h)armless”. I wanted to turn these and other “accepted” jokes and sayings upside down. With Mat, who has short arms, we also wanted to challenge the commonly held assumption that disabled people are passive and somehow harmless. I originally had the wording ARMLESS AND DANGEROUS in mind, a play on “Armed and Dangerous”. Mat is far from harmless but, as he corrected me, he is not armless either. He is in fact SHORT ARMED AND DANGEROUS. This exactness of language is very important. It is not about political correctness, it is about thinking, caring and acceptance. Catherine has one arm, she does not only have one arm. The “only” implies some kind of loss or deficiency which is far from the truth. We used the word ONE on both her sweater and glove. Her glove has the word ONE embroidered across the knuckles, where you might otherwise have “love” or “hate” tattooed. When she holds her clenched fist up and flicks out her thumb it has the word UP embroidered on it. She is ONE-UP. The tattoo theme was taken through into her sweater. She has a butterfly and a bunch of daisies, symbols which have significant personal meaning for Catherine,   embroidered onto her shoulder. There is a banner running through the daisies, which reads AT ONE. She is at one with her one arm, why aren’t you?

(Written statement for “Adorn, Equip”, a Leicester City Gallery touring exhibition, 2001 – 2002)

www.adornequip.co.uk

2000
machine knitted wool
1510 × 580 × 700 mm
installed at Sotheby’s, London

2000
Machine knitted wool, buttons, silk, wood, upholstery materials
990 × 490 × 260 mm
Private commission.
Collaboration with Mary Little, furniture designer and maker.

This commission came about in an unusual way. I had never met Mary Little before but we had a private client in common. The three of us were at the Jerwood Furniture Awards at the Crafts Council Gallery in London where Mary was exhibiting, having been short-listed for the award. The client introduced us saying that he had a plan for the two of us. He wanted to commission us to make him something although he knew that we had never met before and that we were unfamiliar with each others work. He rang Mary the next week with his budget and said that we were to make him a surprise. He did not want to see any working drawings or discuss the piece. We were just given a cheque up front and told to get on with it.

Mary and I met twice. The first time to brainstorm and to get to know each other and our respective work. The second time to come up with a final design. We phoned each other continuously and faxed and posted drawings and colour ideas. Mary also sent the client a contract. It was a straightforward process if a little slow. The collaborative design process was very inspiring. It pushed us further than we could ever have got alone and took us off in new, unexpected directions. Neither of us could have come up with the piece alone.

Our final design, “Footsie”, satisfied us both in terms of aesthetics, function and form. It was also a piece which fully represented both of us. We had conceived of it together but we now had to use our individual skills to fulfill it. Mary started by making the base and then it was passed backwards and forwards between us with me doing the knitting and Mary finally upholstering it.

“Footsie” is a large, lozenge shaped footstool on rockers. The upholstered stool has buttons sewn around the perimeter, onto which a knitted cover is buttoned. The knitted cover has two pairs of socks attached to it, one pair facing the other. When placed between two seated people they can rock it by putting their feet into the socks and moving their feet backwards and forwards. I also embroidered our names “Little Robins”, the word “Footsie” and the cleaning instructions onto the knitted cover in a contrasting colour.

(Statement originally written for “Artists’ Stories”, a-n website, 2000)

1999 Experimental website
http://www.iniva.org/xspaceprojects/robins 

Commissioned by the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) for X-Space, their experimental web space. Produced by Joanne Moore.

I have only recently become involved with new technology and am very excited by its artistic potential. I have started to familiarise myself with the debates around new technology and with computers in general. I have basic computer skills and am in the process of teaching myself how to use “Adobe Photoshop”. I would like to research into knitting and the internet as a way to explore and communicate my fascination with the process of knitting and knitted structures. There are many similarities between knitting and the internet. They are both physically solitary processes. Both are making sense of, translating and communicating information. Computer programs consist of long sequences of instructions that individually are very simple, so does knitting. Both can produce extremely complicated results. Computers and knitting patterns use grids, with coloured squares to relay visual information. With both mediums it is easy to “undo” or “unravel” your work. However knitting is an “everyday skill” of the past with social and cultural associations whereas computers and the internet are an “everyday skill” of the future which cross social, cultural and geographical boundaries. I would like to culminate my research in a web site which is controlled by the user and results in the production of a knitted structure – virtual knitting.
(Statement taken from application to inIVA for X-Space commission, 1999)