Knitted & Knotted

The Dowse’s reputation for celebrating craft and the cutting-edge continues with Knitted & Knotted, an exhibition dealing with daring directions in contemporary craft. Opening on 27^th August, visitors will experience fibres contorted and constructed in mischievous new ways.

Six artists, Ani O’Neill, Jacquelyn Greenbank, Megan Hansen-Knarhoi, Shelly Norton and Erica van Zon, knit, knot, stitch and crochet, reconsidering traditional craft practices. They create intriguing objects of all shapes and sizes that are colourful and humourous, yet intimate and personal.

Megan Hansen-Knarhoi is a sculptor who uses traditional craft techniques to question a range of social issues and rituals.  It has been said that ‘few artists mess so profoundly and so playfully with the sacred and the profane’. Currently living in Napier, Megan learnt her handcraft skills from her grandmother and mother.

Liyen Chong’s practice includes painting, graphic design, photography and embroidery with hair, a traditional Chinese art form. Born in Malaysia and now living in Auckland, Chong creates detailed embroidered ‘drawings’ using hair as the threads. The technique has links to the Victorian tradition of ‘hair painting’ whereby the hair of deceased loved ones was used in paintings and brooches. Liyen has recently moved away from embroidery to the use photographic imagery on found ceramics. Liyen is the 2011 McCahon House Trust Artist-in-Residence.

Ani O’Neill’s practice spans installation, object making and performance. Noted for her significant contribution to the development of contemporary Pacific art, O'Neill successfully combines customary craft processes with modern materials, and intimate hand-made objects with large-scale installations. Based in Rarotonga, O’Neill’s work is imbued with the rich histories and memory of traditional Pacific Island craft techniques such as tivaevae and crochet, passed down from her Cook Island grandmother.

Tauranga-based Jacquelyn Greenbank creates fantastical objects out of wool; carefully knitting, crocheting and stitching around found and recycled, often kitsch, objects. She has knitted and crocheted barbecues, royal carriages, bonsai trees and bicycles. In Knitted & Knotted, Lady Boras represents a 16th Century ship with lace sails featured in a museum in Sweden and alludes to the well-known saying ‘loose lips sink ships.’

Erica van Zon is interested in notions of trickery, pastiche, fakes, and remakes and often re-mixes popular culture and art icons in her work. For Knitted & Knotted, her hand-hooked rug, Rothko, was inspired by Houston’s 1971 Rothko Chapel, inspired by the mural canvases of American painter Mark Rothko. Erica lives in Wellington.

Aucklander Shelley Norton is a contemporary jeweller who knits playful pieces out of recycled plastic bags. ‘My work is centred around how we construct meaning… jouer, is the etymological root of the word jewellery, meaning to play.  I decided to play with our culturally constructed stories about what jewellery should be – small, wearable, precious, and decorative.”