"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