Lou Baker, Social knitwork, Oct. 2022

Social knitwork Lou Baker, Oct 2022

Red is the colour of… sets the scene and is the backdrop to the performances and participation.

Knitting is generally regarded as passive, private and benign and is associated with garments, comfort and domesticity.

Baker’s knitting subverts those expectations. It has a dark side.

(All installation images, Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022, Ferens Art Gallery and Humber Street Gallery. Photography Jules Lister. Courtesy New Contemporaries)

Traditionally, craft shows evidence of high levels of skill. It’s perfect, functional and finished (Parker, 2010). Baker’s knitting is sculptural, sloppy craft; unfinished, unravelling (Patterson and Surette, 2015). Site-responsive, it’s shapeshifting, formlessness and flexible. Immersive, alluring, yet somehow, also, uncanny, its soft impermanence and associated femininities remind us of our mortality.

Baker’s sculptures bring to mind hanging entrails, or blood. She creates an uneasy tension in aesthetics, evoking a bodily presence with notions of absence and the abject. (Kristeva in Felluga, 2015).

Knitting like this, installed in an art gallery, is what Mary Douglas describes as ‘matter out of place’ (1966, p57) and has associations with contamination and dirt. It may lead to a certain disquiet.

Why red?

Louise Bourgeois says:

‘Red is the colour of blood

Red is the colour of paint

Red is the colour of violence

Red is the colour of danger

Red is the colour of shame

Red is the colour of jealousy

Red is the colour of grudges

Red is the colour of blame…. ’

She also says:

‘Colour is stronger than language. It’s a subliminal communication.’

More red knitting!

Over the past few months, Baker has knitted a second series of 50 long, red, sculptures, which will temporarily become part of the installation for the live event.

These pieces will be draped into piles around the artist as she knits with more red wool…

Red is the colour of…, 2, trial installation,

2. The artist, knitting in the space

Knitting in public is very different to knitting in private. It has what art critic Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) describes as ‘relational aesthetics’. It’s a people magnet. When Baker knits in public, strangers talk to her and often the conversation becomes surprisingly in-depth in a short space of time.

For Social knitwork, as Baker knits, she’ll facilitate a welcoming, playful, dynamic environment of creativity, conversation and connection.

Knitting as performance:

Knitting in public definitely has performative aspects to it. Baker knits whenever and wherever she can –on the bus, in the park, on the beach, in restaurants, in queues and in the pub. She takes something that is normally private into the public sphere. Wherever she knits, it sparks conversation.

3. One wearable red, knitted sculpture, Body cocoon 3

Body cocoon 3 is the third in the series of technically wearable - yet oddly unwearable – cocoon-like sculptures that Baker knitted during the Covid-19 lockdowns.

It’s red and has multiple long strands. Each strand is between 1m and 2m in length so that when the wearer twirls, it sets up the personal space required for social distancing.

Baker’s series of Body cocoons is an extension of her research into identity. Knitting is usually associated with garments and the body. Making sculptures that can be worn means that participants can become ‘living sculptures’.

Sadly, of course, during the height of the pandemic, it was impossible to invite others to wear these sculptures so Baker was the only person to wear them. She chose to wear them for private performances in a number of isolated spaces. Click here for a video of her Body cocoon 3 performance on a deserted beach in Wales. Click here for the research and development behind her Living sculptures

This September, in an exhibition in an empty shop in Taunton town centre,

Baker has finally been able to invite visitors to wear her strange garmentlike sculptures and to become living sculptures again.

It’s been delightful to see how people respond to wearing the sculptures. They often move differently and they also spark the imagination, lots of laughter and fabulous conversations.

For

Taunton:

So why a living sculpture alongside a static installation?

Research performance: a performance artist, Harry Coucher, wears Lou Baker’s Body cocoon 3 within Red is the colour of… at Bath Spa University, March 2021

For a video of this performance click here.

Penelope Curtis, the former director of Tate Britain, uses the term‘ensemble’ to describe installations which ‘are animated by their viewers as well as by the sculptures, which disperse or condense the spatial environment around them...’ (2017, p266).

The space, and the installation, will be animated as the passive viewer becomes an active participant-performer.

The living sculpture is camouflaged by the installation and becomes part of it.

People will also enjoy the experience. It will stimulate thought, conversation… and laughter!

Making connections is a critical part of Social knitwork. Research shows that the comfortable conversations that take whilst working together can quickly become profound due to the side-by-side nature of making, the split concentration and the permissible lack of eye contact (Corkhill, 2014, p36).

4. Participants - to make alongside the artist, to become living sculptures and to join the conversation

Baker will invite visitors to make something to add to a growing temporary installation. She will facilitate various activities to appeal to a range of participants. She is an experienced facilitator and has worked with a wide cross section of demographic groups. She will ensure that the project is fully accessible at multiple levels and suitable for all ages and abilities.

red,

Baker is interested in exploring ways to actively engage a range of diverse audiences and particularly ‘different or difficult-to-reach populations’ through Social knitwork (Leavy, 2015, p 233).

Images from Social knitwork, 2022, when Baker spent a day knitting and talking to passers-by under a tree outside the Salvation Army café in Bath, May

Baker will devise ways to document all the interactions, with permission, using a range of techniques like videos, photos, note taking, written feedback and possibly CCTV. She will also offer opportunities to participate virtually on Instagram.

Selected bibliography for Social knitwork:

Bishop. C. (2004) Antagonism and relational aesthetics. Available at: http://www.teamgal.com/production/1701/SS04October.pdf (Accessed: 18 December 2019)

Bourriaurd, N. (2002) Relational aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses du Reel

Corkhill, B. (2014) Knit for health and wellness. Bath: Flatbear Publishing Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Felluga, D. (2015) ‘Modules on Kristeva: On the Abject. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Purdue U. Available from: http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/psychoanalysis/kristevaabject.html (Accessed: 2 June 2014)

Leavy, P. (2015) Method meets art. 2 rev.edn New York: Guilford Press

Parker, R. (2010) The subversive stitch: embroidery and the making of the feminine, 2nd

Edn., London and New York: Tauris

Patterson, E. and Surette, S. (2015) Sloppy craft: Post-disciplinarity and the crafts, London: Bloomsbury