Super String
"Super String" by Kim Fullerton, Winter 2006, pp. 89-90
There’s something just too cheeky about a row of underpants pegged to a line strung across a gallery. You can’t turn away from it. Cindy Baker’s handmade salon des briefs—All Things to All Men (and Women)—dances down the line and onto the wall, animating an entire dimension of space shared with other guerrilla knitters out to revolutionize popular craft techniques, and possibly the world. And so, to enter “Super String,” a group show curated by Stride Gallery’s outgoing director, Anthea Black, is to ready yourself for an exuberant ride through Stitch ’n’ Bitch Nation.
Fun-fur panties for Siamese twins segue into Allyson Mitchell’s white-trash household retreads, Value Village castoffs made of fat yarns in pale shades of yellow and pink and reconfigured into wall hangings bearing startling announcements. A family coat of arms packing a plastic Miss Piggy and frilly placemats scrawled with the slogans “Fat Forever” and “Forever Fat” are transformed into lines of inquiry into class, bad food/taste and fatness. As stamped across a tartan placemat, “sedentary lifestyle,” in the context of this show, is a funny send-up of the notion of an activist lifestyle.
As communal producers guided by the politics of inclusion and democratization of access, the members of the Revolutionary Knitting Circle (RKC) are peaceniks who mix and match their personal values and activist lifestyle with a fresh dose of wit. Their collaboratively knitted banner project Peace Knits, while getting some downtime as an artwork on a wall, has apparently acquired its activist chops at local peace protests.
Anchored in contemporary pop culture but nodding to the time-honoured tradition of making things for people we love is Kris Lindskoog’s 200-foot-long knotted friendship bracelet I want to do something nice for the planet. Coiled in a colourful heap on a plinth, the project is matched with I want you to do something nice for someone, a take-away wrist-sized project for visitors to make themselves.
Mary-Anne McTrowe’s crocheted cozies for kitchen regulars like teapots and wall clocks tease out a low-grade tension between usefulness and decoration, the domestic and public realms, craft and high art. Transformed by their tight skins of wool, these everyday objects are changed from banal discardables to sculptures. But they’re also soft and strokeable, new ironic forms on that crowded shelf of kitsch, coyly inviting someone to invent new functions for them. Like everything in “Super String,” this work is earnestly indebted to traditional craft practices, but, in upending those conventions, it aligns itself with the new ones being patched together by contemporary artist-crafters.
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