What I Did Next

 

The pieces above were made  post-graduation from the Alberta College of Art Design.  Even as a mature student with a successful career in journalism behind me, I found myself  lost and confused as to how to move forward.  The antidote to my paralysis was knitting.   I  was ( and still am)  a rather indifferent knitter inevitably confused, defeated or just plain bored by complex patterns.  But it kept me busy .  I didn’t care what or how I was knitting.  I just kept going reacting intuitively to the present moment –adding rows, turning strange corners , knitting backwards, up and down, changing needles, wool and colours  arbitrarily, sometimes substituting knotting and weaving for knitting.   But at some point I would always know that I was finished with a piece and as I manipulated the outcome of this ‘woolgathering’ I discovered sculptural forms that made a kind of sense, sometimes identifiable as a face or mask, other times perhaps a landscape or just as often, simply pure abstract form.    The series includes 12 pieces.  Looking back at them now I see a connection to my present drawing interest in the association of time and labour as an integral  part of the means of production

 

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