Red knittings, 16.1.20
Lou Baker, 2019, Red is the colour of...., (wearing the unwearable)
spontaneous performance in the studio at Bath Spa Uni, September
spontaneous performance in the studio at Bath Spa Uni, September
Red is the colour..., 2019, a site responsive installation at B-Wing, walkthrough, 16 January 2020
I've finally put together a video walkthrough of Red is the colour of... installed at Shepton Mallet prison. It's only been 2 months since the exhibition finished! Busy times. Anyway, a number of things have struck me during the process of putting it together:
Looking back to look forward:
I've already reflected about the site responsiveness of this piece and others at B-Wing. The run of the exhibition coincided with the started of this MA and I've been busy with the start of the course, inductions and grappling with a Research Methodologies essay but now I've reached the point where I need to think about what to do next!
My research question, in the end, was how and why knitting can be used as a research method, so now I want to make sense of that in my practice. I feel strongly that my recent knitted works at B-Wing - the red knitted installation and my Shadow sacks- were a form of research already. Now I want to analyse what is significant about these pieces in order decide what to do next, in terms of their future, but also in terms of new work.
I first visited Shepton Mallet prison for a meeting about B-Wing on the 10th March last year. It was the perfect day; cold, with bright blue skies. I've written about my first responses in a blog post on the B-Wing website. As a result of that visit I decided I wanted to respond to the traces of those who had been incarcerated there over the years.... and my red knitting was my response to the traces of oppressive emotion that I felt in the place – grief, fear, loneliness, rage, remorse, amongst others. I started knitting straight away, as knitting is slow labour and I wanted this installation to fill the prison as the imagined emotion did!
Looking back to look forward:
I've already reflected about the site responsiveness of this piece and others at B-Wing. The run of the exhibition coincided with the started of this MA and I've been busy with the start of the course, inductions and grappling with a Research Methodologies essay but now I've reached the point where I need to think about what to do next!
My research question, in the end, was how and why knitting can be used as a research method, so now I want to make sense of that in my practice. I feel strongly that my recent knitted works at B-Wing - the red knitted installation and my Shadow sacks- were a form of research already. Now I want to analyse what is significant about these pieces in order decide what to do next, in terms of their future, but also in terms of new work.
I first visited Shepton Mallet prison for a meeting about B-Wing on the 10th March last year. It was the perfect day; cold, with bright blue skies. I've written about my first responses in a blog post on the B-Wing website. As a result of that visit I decided I wanted to respond to the traces of those who had been incarcerated there over the years.... and my red knitting was my response to the traces of oppressive emotion that I felt in the place – grief, fear, loneliness, rage, remorse, amongst others. I started knitting straight away, as knitting is slow labour and I wanted this installation to fill the prison as the imagined emotion did!
I knit therefore I am, 2019, 1 second a day knitting performance on holiday in Costa Rica, July-August
I really do knit whenever and wherever I am, and I've written about that elsewhere. However, there's often noone to take photos, so while we were on holiday in the summer I asked my family to video me knitting for 1 second every day so that I could have a record of my perpetual knitting. I have a love/hate relationship with this video, actually, as I was really ill from about halfway through our holiday, so half of these images remind me strongly of those not so good days! It does capture a snapshot of how I knit though, which has something eccentric yet endearing about it!
