Knitting as a muse…. I always think when people ask me about my knitting. Maybe it is because I work in lace weight or fingering weight wool. It does take extensive time, yet the process is as important as the product.
I look back at the hours that my grandmother spent creating wearables from my ideas, sketches and pictures. I was just a child, but she could make me anything, by looking, experimenting and using her Slovak heritage.
I realised I was an extension of this cultural heritage and often dismissed the pattern in front of me. Rather the sculptural shape and textural qualities gained my interest. I started knitting at an early age, copying my grandmother, breaking the rules and making it up.
Today my work has a signature style of many holes, long dangling entanglements and dyed using eucalyptus leaves. I always start with the quality of the threads, using fine micron merino, alpaca, kid mohair or silk, sometimes it is a combination of fibres, but the overall design will always dictate the final outcome.
At times multiple practices of knitting, weaving and crocheting dictate their use in a work, and each work becomes a ‘one of’ designed wearable that can be unpredictable and nearly every time can be worn in a multitude of ways or wrappings of the body
Concept is paramount, as I want the knitting to evoke associations with adornment and how the body wears the knitted work. The work should create an atmosphere of warmth and expressions of the body that wears it. The identity of the wearer and the identity of the wearable I hope, become entangled into one persona making the wearer feel warmly satisfied with the experience itself.
If my knitting can be the provocateur, I have done my job as a creator with satisfaction. It embeds my wanderings through the Huon Valley in Tasmania, the collection of local Eucalyptus and the many hours in making the work and dyeing it with care and consideration of the Australian environment.