Week 20 - Crochet Craftivism
- Victoria Wells
- May 9
- 4 min read
In her book Hedonistic Technologies Rachel Maines, American academic, asserts that women are in for the ‘rush’ in domestic crafts. They choose wooden knitting needles, rather than metal, because they feel nice. The metal ones are more efficient and tend not to break. Women choose sewing machines that look nice (I am looking at you Ruth) but do not do machine embroidery because they prefer to do that by hand. And in the work that women produce they encode messages to each other as they are ‘protected by the cultural camouflage of needlework’s respectability’. Maine states that men do not understand the meaning of the design elements encoded into the work so the messages remain a secret between women.
Of course this is not always the case and in the 1970’s there was a shift where women used craft to get a message that was readable to men out there. Frances (Budden) Phoenix, founder of a feminist art collective, the Women’s Domestic Needlework Group, produced doilies with political messages. She asked questions and answered them. ‘Who killed Juanita?’ and ‘DEVELOPERS’ referring to a still unsolved case of missing conservation activist Juanita Nielsen.
Phoenix also used found domestic objects like doilies to change into a political statement. Queen of Spades uses an old doilie and reshapes with the use of a zip into a shape that could be a spade shape but could be something else.
Crochet has also been used to illustrate, educate and send a message about the environment. In 2005 sisters, Margaret and Christine Wertheim hatched a plan to crochet some coral reefs to illustrate their beauty and diversity and to show the watcher what they were losing due to higher water temperatures and pollution. The project took off. By 2009 there were tens of thousands of people, 99% women, across three continents, who contributed to the sections of coral reef. The instillation was used academically to illustrate maths, marine biology, women’s handicraft and environmental activism.
As the project and the woolly reef grew the Wertheim’s discovered other things. Coral could be made out of many things; marble, brass or paper, to show its beauty and its diversity, but it is only crochet that can recreate the hyperbolic geometry in the structures. Sea slugs share this geometry and it was discovered by a mathematician who crafted.
Hyperbolic geometry had been uncovered in the late 19 Century but it was not until 1997 that it was modelled. Daina Tamina, mathematician from Cornell, discovered she could model the sea slug geometry with knitting, but this had too many stitches on a needle so crochet became her preferred method. She created a model that many mathemathicians, over many years, had said was impossible to model. And she used a hook and yarn!
Wertheim points out in her Ted Talk that sea slugs and coral, small sea creatures, had been defying Euclidian mathematics for millennia. When she asked a prominent maths academic why this was so he replied that not many mathematicians had been studying sea slugs. Wertheim suggests that this reply points to something deeper; how mathematicians think about what maths is. Even the freest of the maths thinkers could not see the shapes around them; lettuce leaves have the same hyperbolic geometry in their leaves.
The crochet reef project started by using established ways to create shapes, increasing by set numbers for shaping. When the Wertheim sisters starting deviating from this and increasing as they felt like, their models became more realistic. The contributors around the world were encouraged to do their own embellishments. Just as evolution changes the world a over time, so the crocheted reef changed and became more complex. There are now several reef projects that examine climate change: The Bleached Reef, made with video tape and plastic, and the Giant Coral Forest, a instillation centred around large trees of coral, one made of yarn and one of plastic emulating the Great Pacific Garage Patch a gyre of plastic that floats around the Pacific Ocean.
Born in 1936, trained Polish artist Ewa Pachucka, abandoned painting in the 1960’s to concentrate on her art forms using knitting and macrame, after a move to Tasmania. She moved to these materials because she thought they were more human than wood, metal or marble. Landscape and Bodies, now held by the National Gallery NSW, is a huge work using hemp, jute and wire. The life-sized bodies are reminiscent of the corporal forms found at Pompeii, slumped, seemingly lifeless and seen as a group. Pachucka wanted to emphasis humans as a collective, not as individuals. In her work this is done by the repeat of stitches creating patterns in a monochrome. By using these forms, materials and techniques Pachucka brought attention to the overlook realm of the work that women do, especially in the art space.
Crochet craftivism does not have to be done by an artist it is often carried out by domestic crocheters in their own homes to be displayed in public. Yarn bombing can be done in a light hearted way and does not always carry a heavy political message. Wrapping trees in colourful bands or crocheting Wallace and Gromit to sit outside a pub in Yorkshire brings attention to the craft and reminds all the watchers ‘we are still here, look at us’. Maybe those crocheters are just going for the rush!
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