Exhibition gallery

A Collaborative Cartography: half/angel’s The Knitting Map
© Deborah Barkun, 2007

Millersville University is pleased to welcome half/angel’s The Knitting Map to the Ganser Gallery.  As a region steeped in a rich history of fiber arts, Central Pennsylvania is an especially appropriate site for The Knitting Map’s US debut.  Like the quilt, a textile inseparable from Central Pennsylvania history, The Knitting Map evokes a cultural moment in Cork, Ireland that led to the city’s selection, in 2005, as the European Capital of Culture.  When faculty and staff in the Art Departmentwere introduced to The Knitting Map, they felt an immediate affinity for Cork residents’ desires to “fabricate” their experience of place.  The understanding of place, affected by color, climate, and community, is intimately connected to one’s relationship to and traversal of space.  Indeed, one’s visual and social landscape transforms identity.  Likewise, people shape place, suffusing streets and architecture with vitality and character.  By translating traffic flow and weather patterns into representative stitches and colors, more than two thousand volunteer knitters generated a conceptual topography as diverse as Cork’s nearly half-million residents and their respective relationships to the urban fabric.

Knitting can be solitary or communal, mindless or contemplative, visual or tactile.  For the knitter, the intricate choreography of needles and yarn can yield both text and textile.  Whether a stitch takes the form of a simple garter or a complex cable, its calligraphic lines can be read in tones amplified or hushed.  Thus, the language of knitting is a shared language.  Like quilting bees, “knit-ins” and knitting guilds provide instruction, community, and conversation.  In 2005, in Cork, half/angel coordinated a rotating group of knitters who congregated around “knitting stations” in the crypt of St. Luke’s Church, Summerhill, chronicling city traffic and weather according to computer-generated patterns.  In practice, this communal activity encouraged mutual exchange and united disparate individuals in a collaborative fabric and collective yarn.  The Knitting Map’s vast scale attests to this multiplicity of voices.  The result is a panorama that uniquely captures a city and its community.

When four large wooden chests containing The Knitting Map arrived in the Art Department, the scent of cedar, a fragrance that evokes anticipation and nostalgia, filled the air.  Like scent, textiles and needlework can trigger associations and memories.  Memory quilts, friendship quilts, and mourning quilts, such as the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt, parts of which were exhibited at Millersville University in November 2006, typically incorporate meaningful scraps of cloth, while handwork may aid the quilter in the ritualized work of memory, chronology, or grief.  Cultural historian and critic Marita Sturken has noted the significance of quilting for women as a means of fabricating cultural memories from which they were formally excluded.   Similarly, art historian Rozsika Parker has written about the traditional role of needlework for women in performing the work of mourning.  According to Parker, the “time taken to complete a memorial sampler or picture allowed a period of mourning, and possible acceptance of separation and loss.”   Like quilting and embroidery, the art of knitting may function as a treasured heirloom handed down to friends and family.  By blanketing their environments, works like The Knitting Map and the AIDS Quilt evince the power of collaboration to produce objects of security, solace, and comfort.  Intertwined in The Knitting Map’s complex fibers are the received traditions of past generations.  Like textile generally, knitting has the ability to transmit to future generations the experience of a unique time and place.  The influence of this may be seen in the adaptation of knitting and crocheting as a contemporary art medium. Rosemarie Trockel’s “knitted paintings,” Oliver Herring’s sculpture, knitted from wool, tape, and mylar, and the mixed media installations of Xenobia Bailey exemplify the move by contemporary artists to embrace and re-articulate textile art forms.  Current exhibitions such as “Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting” at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York attest to the contemporary use of fiber and textile arts to challenge conventional understandings of issues such as globalization, gender, ethnicity, and environmentalism.  As contemporary artists devise ways to translate their memories of traditional needlework into an innovative visual language, they add to the ongoing project of memory.  The Knitting Map stands as a crucial, collaborative example of this.

When exhibited, The Knitting Map’s orientation varies according to the site in which it is installed.  As The Knitting Map drapes and flows over and through the space of Millersville University’s Ganser Gallery it achieves a unique confluence of two places normally separated by distance and national boundaries.  On March 23, 2007, Central Pennsylvanian knitters will board a Red Rose Transit trolley to “knit Lancaster” in the company of half/angel artists Jools Gilson-Ellis and Margaret Kennedy.  Using colors of yarn representative of the region—red for the Red Rose City, blue for the Puerto Rican flag, green for agriculture, and tan for the Amish community—knitters will orient their stitches to correspond to directional changes of the trolley’s route as it navigates Lancaster City.  The trolley’s path through the urban environment will encourage knitters to share personal stories of Lancaster and motivations for knitting, thereby transforming the mundane atmosphere of public transit into a roving “knit-in.”  The Lancaster Museum of Art will generously serve as a workshop space where knitters will combine their individual panels into a möbius strip, a three-dimensional form with only one side and one edge, symbolically unifying regions and populations.  The finished piece will serve as a prop for a performance by Gilson-Ellis.  This celebration of collaborative art practice will initiate a weekend of activities designed to welcome half/angel and The Knitting Map to Central Pennsylvania and will culminate in a reception for The Knitting Map exhibition.

Deborah Barkun
Assistant Professor of Art History
Department of Art
Millersville University
March 2007