The Wonder of Wool

This is curator Trevor Pitt's latest exhibition of works called WOW - The contemporary art of knit & stitch. What a fabulous exhibition it looks.  Too bad it's all the way up the M6 at the Rheged Gallery, Penrith.  It looks like Trevor has put together a great selection of artists and designers who have all been inspired by the Wonder of Wool.  My kind of thing and I just get so excited when I see work like this.

Sweater Companion - Celia Pym

Celia Pym is an artist working with stitch and embroidery.   She likes taking old and forgotten items like this moth eaten sweater and breathing new life into it. She says: 

"To get me settled in my studio I would knit to ready my fingers and get thinking. I soon discovered that I would knit for whole afternoons."    

She sounds like my kind of girl!  Oh how I would love the chance to sit and knit for whole afternoons. Luxury lad, luxury! 

"Now I darn and am looking for holes in people’s clothes and the stories that accompany them; repairing these holes and returning the mended garments. It is a way to briefly make contact with strangers. I am interested in the spaces the body occupies, the tenderness of touch and the ways in which we go about day to day life."       

Celia Pym

Craft Kills - Freddie Robbins

Freddie Robbins uses knitting to explore pertinent contemporary issues of the domestic, gender and the human condition.

Knitted Homes of Crime - Freddie Robbins

 Here Freddie Robbins has knitted the homes of female killers or the houses where they committed their crimes.  A really creepy concept.

Gin Socks - Deirdre Nelson

Here Deirdre Nelson's Gin Socks - in Shetland in the 1700s women knitted socks in winter and when the dutch fishing boats came in they would barter their knitted socks for gin.  3 socks = 1 pint of gin.
I like the history behind this; the idea that women used their craft skills to survive.  Its another matter whether they drank the gin or perhaps were even more enterprising and sold the gin to make a profit. I definitely  would have drunk it.