I’m thinking a lot about weaving, so much so that the repetitive patterns are looping into my brain when it’s being soft… when I’m sleeping I’m feeling the rhythm of double stitches in my trying-to-sleep body, when I’m eating I’m picturing my tongue looping noodles into chains and when I’m working at my desk, my thoughts are dancing in and over each other. This is a very ADHD thing for me to do; a new hyper obsession (for me) isn’t purely a cognitive burn to know, learn and mentally digest everything I can about a subject, but a completely embodied folding of the new topic’s pulse into daily experience.
I’ve been learning to crochet because I’ve started a new artist’s residency for which I chose to focus on food growing. That doesn’t seem to make much sense. It’s been a tangential process to arrive here and it’s only been 2 weeks! Let me explain
Interest: how can the ways we grow, prepare and eat food illuminate how we approach care and time for humans. Is the growing season really so ‘seasonal’? Can I sow some seeds a little late because I forgot because I have poor time management?
Oooh, I like the garden space as Possobilities (where I’m based for the residency). I’d like to do something out here. It’s called a sensory garden but it’s winter time and so there isn’t much out here to tickle the senses right now.
They have bamboo frames! These must have been used for climbing plants. I just did a residency at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop where I started making these webby ‘things’ using beads and fishing wire and it was all king of inspired by Lucy Jones’ book Matrescence and all the weird things that also go through metamorphosis in nature like slime molds and stuff and also like rhizomes and how queer they are are cool and such a great representation of a good strong community. Maybe I can replicate this on the bamboo frames and give something pretty for the climbing plants to climb on.
Possobilities also runs a knitting group. Great, I'll learn to crochet because I don’t like knitting but it’s similar and I can use twine or something to make these climbing things from.
While I’ve been crocheting, it’s also given me the time to think about this action too as a lovely metaphor for care and community. In a way it's different to the web or the rhizome because I’m currently using just one yarn and creating a beautiful, repeated pattern from it. But it feels similar in that it’s creating links and knots and connections… It's a form of beautiful chaos which can be very strong.
I’ve also been thinking about my nana, who died when I was 18 and who I had a complicated relationship with. I never fully grieved her and she remains present in my thought-memory-feeling-palace popping up at unexpected times with varying strengths. She knitted and when I look at my hands working the wool, I think of hers. Her yarn always stank of ciggies though… I’d get a lovely new hand made cardi all smelling of baccy. I smoke, but only outside.
The more I think about weaving, crocheting, knitting, knotting, the more I see how often it is connected to land, food and community. I see it in the way climbing plants and vines weave themselves, in willow weaved growing frames and folk costumes, in nets for catching fish. Even making flies for fishing involves wrapping thread over and over again.
Anyway, I bloody hate writing endings to things… they always feel so trite. So here’s some piccies of my crochet attempts.
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