Hand knitted, mixed yarn from someone else's stash, knitting needles
Frolicking with Flesh of my Flesh as a work in progress on the beach in Northumberalnd, August 2024. Click for the full image.
Flesh of my flesh is a hand knitted sculpture, made with a fabulous spectrum of the colours of my skin. It's mixed yarn from someone else's stash. Unfinished and still attached to a series of circular knitting needles, the work is a shapeshifter, changing form though tension and gravity. It's a fom of self-portrait.
Conscious of my ageing body, this sculptures is knitted as a web or net of interconnecting holes, formless and potentially unravelling.
Over recent years I've knitted and stitched a number of (my) flesh coloured sculptures and in September last year I installed a number of them, as Made flesh 2024 at The Corridor at Spike Island in Bristol. Flesh of my flesh didn't feature in that installation as it was still a work in progress.
And why holes? Flesh of my flesh is similar in form and aesthetics to a number of my earlier sculptures:
All the babies I might have had, 2012, Shroud, 2013 and Heart of Darkness, diptych, 2014.
There are holes in my Shadow sacks, 2019 and also in some of my Red is the colour of..., 2019-2023 sculptures
For me, these holes are about absence, or damage, and maybe frailty too. In fact, knitting itself is made up of multiple interconnected holes. The process of knitting holes is quite complex....decreasing stitches creates the hole and then increasing them completes it. It feels like a form of mending. Looking back, it seems as if knitting holes has been one way that I've processed a number of personal losses over the years - infertility, mid-life, a heart condition and now ageing. I've knitted Flesh of my flesh with a growing awareness of the frailty of my body, with new diagnoses of various age-related medical issues. Maybe its my way of coming to terms with getting old!
However, for me, there's also something joyous about this fleshly self portrait. Activated by my body and the wind on a beach in Northumberland where I'd been knitting it on holiday, it becomes a living sculpture, seemingly still having some life in it!
Over the past couple of years I've been given a number of stashes of yarn -large collections of mixed fibres that have been selected and collected by other people. I am challenging myself to be more sutainable in my practice, so I've been limiting myself to only using yarn from these stashes. It's an interesting change in control, limiting my colour choice but also adding some delightful textures and surfaces. Read all about the first sculpture I made this way in 2023, Stash, which I've written about for seam collective in a blog post called Stash busting and shapeshifting. This selection of pinks was part of a sizeable stash of luxury yarns and cotton given to me by a young woman in Bath who was moving. She was delighted to donate her to collection to me to make knitted sculptures. Thank you for your generosity!