Giddy Up !

Over the last week or so, during my knitting breaks I've been designing a set of Racing Silks, for a live brief thats come up at College. Its been really refreshing, and I'm really pleased with how their looking. Hoping to post more on this as the project moves forward.  Also, have finally got my hands on a knitting machine, production is about to step up a notch !

23/3/2011

Ai Weiwei

Iron wood Polyhedron 

or 

Massive football

either way its great

20/3/2011

"It's not perfect, but who cares?"

Since I've taken it up recently, I have been reading a lot about knitting. I have discovered a number of artists who use knitting in their work and have also done a lot of research on the process of knitting itself.

Freddie Robins is an artist who uses the craft of knitting to realise her outcomes, talking about her work called, "The Perfect,' she spoke about imperfection and craft, subjects intrinsic to my current work.

"I am very attracted to the imperfections, failings, and roughness of the material world. I enjoy the evidence of human hands, the inevitable wear and repair of objects. I love the obviously handmade. But I suffer from being a perfectionist. 

Perfectionism is associated with good craftmanship, something to aspire to. I aim for perfection in all aspects of my life, my work and myself. It can be very debilitating and exhausting, it is of course, truly unachievable, and ultimately undesirable. "

Freddie Robins

Robin's produces some really interesting work, "The Perfect" is a collection of knitted life size sculptures machine knitted by a flatbed machine capable of knitting a seamless garment. The pieces have a eerie almost sinister feel, but their really interesting and highlight the potential of knitting.

Selected works by Freddie Robbins, 'Forearmed, Forewarned, Banners and The Perfect.'

Knitting Theory

'soothing rhythms of working with our hands'

'The existence of knitting implies the skilled and repetitive manipulation of tools, albeit deceptively simple tools, in the case of knitting needles.'

> "The objects created by gesture are the surviving evidence of the gesture itself" <

Learning to knit:

'A purposeful alignment of the novices attention to the movements of others, and a co-ordination of that attention with the novices own movements so as to achieve a purposeful alignment of the kind of rhythmic adjustment or resonance that is the hallmark of fluent performance.'

in short, this is an intense one-to-one experience of learning, a relationship of "body, gesture and artefact in a process of intimate interaction."

'what the practitioner does to things is grounded in the active perceptual involvement with them. This involvement underwrites the qualities of care, judgement , and dexterity that are the essence of skilled workmanship...the practitioners engagement rather than a mere mechanical coupling-because he watches, listens and feels as he works.'

Mary M Brooks

20/3/2011

Granny Griffin !

So the knitting is in full flow, I've bought various balls of wool to get me started, some colour choices are dictated by established football colours, however I have also considered the effectiveness of certain combinations and the contrast they create.

Before getting on to knitting the real thing, I knitted a few samples to get used to the process. In particular casting on and casting off, which is basically putting the wool on and taking it off the needles, it can be quite tricky. I also had to get to a point where I stopped dropping stitches (this makes holes) and become confident enough to notice errors and rectify them.

Heres a scan of one such sample (notice the holes) In my short time knitting though, I've become really fond of the process and even more so the outcome, I really love the texture it creates.  

17/3/2011

Bar Chart / Bar Scarf / Bar Graph

Scarves as a vehicle to present statistical information. 

Casting On

So I've been thinking about this concept of the football scarf, as a vehicle to display information. In their conventional form, they comprise mainly blocks of solid knitted colour which remind me alot of information graphics, solid colour which is displayed to represent values or quantities. I think working with sacrves is an exciting idea and i think there is great potential in realigning the purpose of the football scarf.  

As a result of this I have began to experiment with knitting, its such a fascinating process, which really surprised me, as it used to be something I associated with my Nan.  I found also that i'm actually quite a natural and I've been getting to grips with the basics of hand knitting and all the knitting lingo.  Im really enjoying pushing the work in this directional, I like where its going, and its interesting how its encompassing a lot of the interests I outlined in my initial proposals for my self initiated work.  As well as being intrinsically linked to football, it also circles back to the collections I'm interested in, and also touches on a term I've quoted more than once the 'beauty of repetition,' (the process of knitting). Knitting also relates to my love of the hand made and craftsmanship.  

THE CRAFTSMAN

"The intimate connection between the hand and the head."

" The craftsman represents the special human condition of being engaged."

"Basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well, for its own sake."

I found these quotes today whilst reading a friends blog, (Her names Ariane, check out her work its BRIGHT) the quotes are from a book called 'The Craftsman' by Richard Sennet the quotes are really compelling and very relative to what I'm trying to achieve with my work.

14/3/2011

Twists, Knots & Holes

I've always had in interest in collections and the effect of repetition. Inspired by finding the bobble hat and rosette collections I began looking for other collections, in some instances collections that occur in public. Collections that aren't always obvious. A collection of people for example, united by a common belief or interest. A public protest, maybe. This got we thinking about football again and the taxonomy of a football crowd. A collection of people united by their support for their team.

"Collections are constructions or compositions, "the ultimate term in the series that marks the collection is the 'self,' the articulation of the collectors own 'identity'."

Susan Stewart

This train of thought brought me full circle back to the bobble hats for some reason. Then i started about how the texture and colours of them, and how great they were. Then I thought of scarves. I began to collect images of football scarves, and collections of football scarves when they are held aloft at matches to create a sea of fabric, almost merging into one.

This jolted me into realizing how common place football scarves are at matches and how much part of the furniture they are. They are everywhere at matches, I'd become so used to them, I'd started to not even notice them anymore. They display team colours, team slogans, and you also get 'half and half' scarves, which are made for almost every match. They have one half dedicated to one team, one half to the other and usually the date and competition.

I started to think about the purpose of these scarves. I came to the conclusion they in essence have to purposes, they are either designed as a memory, something to collect, to mark an occasion (a match) or a show of identity (this is my team) when held aloft.

"ARTICULATION OF THE COLLECTORS IDENTITY"

This considered, I now consider the scarf, in particular the football scarf, as

"A universal vehicle to display information."

14/3/2011

My FA Cup Letterpress block arrived today, its really neat, I cant wait to use it !

____________

4/3/2011

Experimenting

I came cross the work of Ben Casey today from The Chase. He was commissioned by Preston North End Football Club to re-design their logo and stationery, a job Ben described as “the perfect self initiated project”, encompassing design, art and football. To answer the brief Casey experimented with Letterpress and which produced some really nice results, so happy were Preston North End, they then asked Casey if he would redesign their STADIUM. For which he created these rather cool designs, based on treating seats as pixels. 







I then came across some work which has been mentioned to me in the past, Lego Letterpress. Justin LaRosa used Lego pieces to print some beautiful prints, which really opened my horizons to the possibilities of Letterpress and really inspired me to experiment with it further.





I want to experiment with colour, maybe creating some gradients or multiple colour prints, and also experiment with some different coloured paper stocks. Im also bidding on some vintage blocks on ebay, so I'm hoping to get them to use soon ! This lego printing coupled with the seats as pixels idea, got me wondering, about the possibilities of a football seat letterpress print, made possible with some polymer plates, we'll see, watch this space.

3/3/2011

He's 5'4"

Here's my latest Print, inspired by a little Russian chap, called Andrei Arshavin, its a continuation of my exploration of football songs and Letterpress printing. I think its a really successful print, I experimented with colour a bit more than with my previous attempts at Letterpress and also used various paperstocks to see how this would effect the final outcome.

1/3/2011