Textiles, Community and Controversy: The Knitting Map 9781350027541, 9781350027527

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For a thousand knitters and more . . .

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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’m writing this in May 2018, sitting in a gazebo in Fota Gardens in County Cork. It’s a short and pretty train ride from Cork City Centre to get here. From the tall house on Summerhill North, where I walk down four flights of stairs, I then trip across the road and down more steps to the station. Just a few hundred metres from here across the wide lawns, and through the sounds of birdsong, I performed for one of The Knitting Map’s monthly ‘knit ins’, in July 2004. We held twelve of these events that year, performances in public spaces in the city, or close by, followed by a knit-in, where our growing group of knitters would sit and knit with us. My performances were playful, sometimes raucous affairs that cajoled our audiences with wool and knitting in provocative and twinkling ways. We did this on the street, on buses, in shopping centres, even on the back of motorbikes. We had a lot of fun, and I got to wear some pretty extraordinary knitted outfits, made mostly by Kate O’Brien and Susan Tector Sands (see Chapter 9). In that year (2004), we were preparing to launch The Knitting Map itself, in January 2005, and we needed knitters to do that. So, in 2004, when I also got the train to Fota Gardens from Cork City, in an outfit knitted from cotton yarn in shades of pale blue and turquoise, I came here in the sunshine and wove a performance in the gardens beside the big house here, winding children into its games, and finding ways for playfulness to work on the possibilities of knitting, on the literal as well as the wide heft and history of all its gestures. Unbeknown to those children dancing with me on the lawn, I was seeding revolution. I was proposing that playfulness might be a political act, and that it was possible to do this by reworking knitting as literal fact and resonant metaphor. There are children here today on this late spring morning, pre-school and toddling with their mothers. I watch them as I look up from typing, tripping between the irises. In 2018, it seems a very long time ago that I danced here at Fota, when I was innocent of what would happen with The Knitting Map, and how it might become a cypher for how textile art tangles with community and controversy. This book is a significant marker in the journey of The Knitting Map, even as its story continues. Here, at the book’s beginning, I write to thank the many communities of people who have contributed to The Knitting Map project in all its iterations. I thank you for getting us here, for making it possible that the vibrant voices here written, and all those who contributed to its making, might entwine to make a solid thing you can hold in your hands and pore over, or something you peer at online. I write here all the thank-yous that fourteen years can hold. Firstly to Richard Povall, who led The Knitting Map project with me from 2003 to 2005. Richard was the Codirector of our company, half/angel, from 1996 to 2006. vi

Composer, sound artist, filmmaker, photographer and friend, Richard was also an alchemist of technology and the person behind the technology that drove The Knitting Map. Thank you, Richard, for all you gave to make The Knitting Map happen. The Knitting Map was commissioned in 2003 by the Executive of the European Capital of Culture: Cork 2005, specifically Mary McCarthy (now Director of the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork), Tony Sheehan (now Director of Triskel Arts Centre in Cork) and Thomas McCarthy (poet and Cork City librarian). Other Cork 2005 staff who worked closely with us on the project were Tracy McCormack (Director of Project Management) and Valerie Byrne (Project Manager, now Director of the National Sculpture Factory in Cork). half/ angel had a busy two years from 2003 to 2005, and my thanks to all those who worked for the company during that time on The Knitting Map: Kate O’Brien (Project Manager), Susan Tector Sands (Project Coordinator), Michelle Whelan (Office Manager), Elizabeth O’Dea (Administrator), Margaret Kennedy (Administrator) and Maureen O’Rourke (intern). Thank you to the following community groups and schools who worked closely with The Knitting Map project in 2005: L’Arche, Blarney Girls School, Cois Tine, Coláiste Choilm, Cope Foundation, ICA (Irish Countrywomen’s Association), Mná Feasa (Domestic Violence Project), NCIB (National Council for the Blind of Ireland), National Learning Network, Niche (Northside Community Health Initiative) and St Luke’s Women’s Group. Thank you to Bernadette Sweeney, who photographed The Knitting Map performances during 2004, and to Enrica Bertolini, who designed the knitting amphitheatre that housed the project. Our group of core knitters included Marian O’Sullivan, Mel Murphy, Betty Flynn, Mary Norris, Lesley Stothers, Elsie O’Connell, Eileen Henrick, and Helle Krammer. Thank you also to David Rawson, Marketing Manager at Sirdar (now retired), who facilitated the wool sponsorship for The Knitting Map, and to Kieran McCarthy (Independent Councillor, Cork City Council) for his unstinting support and for publishing an oral history of The Knitting Map (McCarthy 2005). Research and development for The Knitting Map was also supported by an Arts Council (Ireland) Multi-Disciplinary Artist’s Bursary (2003). After 2005, storage for The Knitting Map was initially provided by Cork City Arts Office, and my thanks to Liz Meaney (now Arts Director at the Arts Council, Ireland) for facilitating this. John Fitzgerald (Librarian, Boole Library University College Cork [UCC]) and Crónán O’Doibhlin (Head of Research Collections & Communications, Boole Library, UCC) also provided storage for the work for a number of years, and my thanks to them for this. The work is now in private storage. The Knitting Map exhibition at Cork City Hall in 2006 was facilitated by Ali Robertson of the Cork Midsummer Festival (now Executive Producer at Kneehigh Theatre, UK). Thank you to Jeri Robertson (then Chair of Visual Arts, Millersville University, PA) whose invitation to exhibit the work in Pennsylvania in 2007 got us across an ocean and into the Ganser Gallery. My thanks to Margaret Kennedy, who was our project assistant for this exhibition. This 2007 exhibition was generously supported by Culture Ireland, Arts Council Ireland and the Arts Faculty at UCC. My sincere thanks to Fiona Kearney, Director of The Glucksman, as well as Chris Clarke (Senior Curator, Exhibitions) and Tadhg Crowley (Senior Curator, Education) for their careful curation of The Knitting Map as well as the documentation of the controversy for the exhibition at The Glucksman in 2015 (The Knitting Map: Art, community and Acknowledgments   vii

controversy 2005–2015). Thanks also to Michael Waldron, who was my research assistant for this exhibition, and to Tomás Tyner (UCC photographer). This book arose out of a symposium held in The Glucksman during this exhibition, made possible through the support of the Glucksman and with grants from the President’s Fund and Boole Library Visiting Speakers’ Fund, as well as a conference grant from the School of English, all at UCC. Particular thanks to my co-editor, Nicola Moffat. This book was generously supported by a Publications Grant from the National University of Ireland, as well as a grant from the Strategic Research Fund (Research & Innovation) and a Research Publication Grant from the School of English, both at UCC. Visual research was provided by Gillian Walsh. Thank you also to our editors at Bloomsbury who worked on this book: Belinda Campbell, Faith Marsland and Pari Thompson. The art critic and scholar Deborah Barkun wrote the catalogue essay for the exhibition at the Ganser Gallery, Pennsylvania, in 2007, and since then we have collaborated on several essays on The Knitting Map. One of these – Choreographed Cartography (Gilson & Barkun 2011) – surprised us by winning the 2010 Founding Presidents Award from the Textile Society of America. We also presented on The Knitting Map at conferences at the University of Nebraska and California State University. Thank you, Deborah, for a decade of continued belief in the value and importance of The Knitting Map and for proposing that we write and present on the work internationally. I owe particular thanks to my colleague Róisín O’Gorman, whose belief in The Knitting Map buoyed me through years of ongoing media controversy. She unhesitatingly felt the work was important, and when I didn’t believe her, her continued encouragement to write about the controversy, to focus on exhibiting the work, was critical to the 2012 Performance Research article (reprinted here), the 2015 exhibition at the Glucksman in Cork, and this book. Fiona Kearney (Director of the Glucksman) also believed in this project enough to suggest that what was an expanding catalogue should become a book. Thank you. To Penny Rae (formerly Director of Triskel Arts Centre, Cork), whose intelligence, experience, laughter and bike riding in 2004 and 2005 made me glad and wiser in all kinds of ways. To my family, who have grown up with The Knitting Map as background. As well as everything else, I became a mother in 2005, adopting five-month-old Natalie from Guatemala in October. When we exhibited at the City Hall the following year, she came and played on its surface, delighted at the colours. The year after that, in 2007, we exhibited the work in Pennsylvania, and when I travelled to work on the exhibition, it was also the first time I left my daughter. When I returned to Cork, our family immediately left again to travel to Guatemala to meet our daughter’s birth brother, then eight months old. The Pennsylvania exhibition was shot through with thoughts of my daughter and her brother, who I Figure 0.1  Natalie Gilson standing hoped would become our son. One of the women who came to the on The Knitting Map at the exhibition exhibition in Pennsylvania (Anne Rogers) sent Natalie a beautiful in Millennium Hall, Cork, Ireland, book – a fairytale about quilts and quilting with an image towards June 2006. half/angel. Acknowledgments   viii

its end that looked just like The Knitting Map (Brumbeau & de Marcken 2001). Anne sent it with dozens of colourful stamps on the envelope, so that Natalie pored over the cacophony of colours when it arrived. The book was accompanied by a quilt book, so that you could make the quilts from the fairytale. When our son was two years old and still stuck in Guatemala, I invited neighbours and friends to make one of these quilts for him, because I couldn’t believe that he was still not in our arms. Róisín O’Gorman, with the fervour of possession, took up the task of finishing that quilt, and she and I spent evenings and days piecing together cotton shapes – blue fishes and deep reds – sitting together late into the night in front of sewing machines in Ballymacoda and Cork: the making of my family is all tangled up with textiles of the knitted and quilted kind. At the heart of this making is my resilient and steady husband, Vittorio Bufacchi, who has been by my side from the beginning, when I first dreamed up the idea of The Knitting Map. For fifteen years he has enthused and listened, reassured and responded coolly, when I was full of indignation and exasperation, or just sorrow, and latterly joy. We have a teenager now, and a boy almost twelve, who make our family a place of busy discussion and debate, of meal-making, and film-discussing, and chivvying to school and activities. Since we are an Italian father, a British mother, and two Guatemalans living in Ireland, we know all about knitting together family. And without them all, I could not have made this book and all that came before it. Thank you. Finally, to all the knitters who knitted The Knitting Map in 2005: This book is for you. Jools Gilson

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y foremost thanks goes to Jools Gilson, who graciously invited me to join efforts with her in making this book a reality and whose expertise and insight gave me a new fascination with both maps and knitting. I am very grateful for the opportunity to have worked with Jools, as well as with the book’s contributors, whose varying experiences, views, and skills I have found to be rich, astonishing, and enchanting. Thank you all for teaching me so much about the importance of material objects, of community, and of making. I would also like to add further thanks to Jools and Richard Povall, whose hard work, bravery, and poetic imaginations made The Knitting Map a possibility in the first place. I would like also to thank my aunt, Linda van Duyker, whose constant and consistent encouragement gave me the confidence to keep writing. Thanks also to my cousin, Marian van Duyker, for helping me to locate Linda’s haiku, which is included in my chapter, and to my father, Russell Moffat, for helping me with place names I had forgotten. Thank you to Paul Casey, Shara McCallum, Anna Monk, and the wonderful readers at Ó Bheál (Cork’s longest running open mic night) for your encouragement and feedback on the creative sections of my chapter. Finally, I would like to thank the women of Cork–those who knitted, both publicly and privately; those whose voices have rung out with mine in joy, frustration, laughter, anger, and love; those whose hands and hearts have touched and are touched; and to the makers, every one of you, thank you! Nicola Moffat Acknowledgments   ix

PREFACE

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f all the projects that came to us at the offices of the 2005 European Capital of Culture in Cork, half/angel’s The Knitting Map has proved to be the most deeply imagined and the most enduring. Yes, there were other ambitious projects, the Munster Literature Centre’s astonishing European Translation Series, the Crawford Gallery’s James Barry exhibition and the National Sculpture ­Factory’s cerebral Caucus, but The Knitting Map delivered with elegance and plenitude; it was, to quote its creator, Jools Gilson, ‘a thing made slowly together (thousands of us)’ (Gilson 2012: 18). Here, in this timely and necessary publication, new voices of critique as well as the veteran voices of remembrance, are gathered together. Fionna Barber’s brilliant and complex essay locates the half/angel project within the contested aesthetic of Irish landscape art and its political imperatives. Barber captures this new moment in durational art beautifully: ‘the constant clacking of needles, fragments of conversation and laughter, the smell and feel of wool.’ Richard Povall, an important ‘dance-tech’ expert of our era and co-imaginer of the project, gives a haunting guide to the thought processes and professional practice that helped engineer this new map of our Cork world. Povall, always idealistic and romantic, had the unenviable task of filtering a knitting pattern from inputs of movement, traffic and weather. At times, his control desk in the crypt of St Luke’s Church looked like the bridge of a spaceship under attack. To attempt to speak with him at such moments was merely to exchange complaints with a worried skipper. Jessica Hemmings’ decision to see knitting as a noun, rather than a verb, is an insightful one. It allows us to understand that, as artists, what we do is where we dwell. She explains that ‘textiles and a general level of knowledge shared by the public about textile techniques have made them useful components of participatory art strategies.’ And this was precisely the genius of The Knitting Map: it called a massive, unprecedented community into action. Not just working-class women, but intellectuals, teachers, academics, musicians, serious persons from a most serious, passionate city, all answered Jools and Richard’s call to the workstations. While I was painfully aware of

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much publicised hostility to this project, the Cork ‘slagging’ about a big cardigan for the poor of Cork, the perceived favouritism of a youngish 2005 programme team for expensive new-fangled notions, I was also aware of an immense communal power that became more powerful with every Cork 2005 day that passed. This project created its own vortex, its own quiet-spoken, superior brilliance. Kieran McCarthy’s essay here captures some of that firm and formal intimacy of a truly communal artwork. That this could happen speaks volumes for Jools Gilson’s and Richard Povall’s confidence and faith. Their belief made it happen; before a thing can be, it must be imagined. ‘So here is the affect of failure. It hurts. It is an injury’, Jools writes, still remembering the hostility and a perceived lack of buy-in by the powers-that-were in a small European Capital of Culture. Yet even her own memories of the project are saturated with the stains and dyes of the poetry she achieved – with Amethyst and Heather, Glencoe and Naturelle, Biscuit and Sandstorm. All the colours and tones that she would transform into a wide, ambitious, embracing work of art. What Cork had given in programme funding it withheld in affection. I think this is often the trade-off in a huge public project, certainly in Ireland, where the advocacy of one artist is seen as an exclusion of some other good person. These feelings and atavisms are always at play in the politics of arts funding, but I don’t think a city or an arts community can allow these political amino acids to freeze decision-making. As programmers in Cork 2005 we insisted on a process and we lived by it. Lucky for us, one of our flagship projects was this communal and mystical The Knitting Map. The Map itself is a thing made, a great fabric that captured time, a haughty silent structure. And when I looked at it again in The Glucksman at UCC, I understood its muteness, that brilliant knitters had created something absolutely extremist in its non-verbal nature. More than a decade later, still, even still, I can understand its modernist verbal frugality, its enduring, silent power in an Irish city that was always full of the most fabulous talk. Here in half/angel’s wool was all the murmur and innuendo of taxis, traffic lights and rain. Thomas McCarthy, Poet Cork, Ireland, 2017

Preface   xi

INTRODUCTION Mapping this book: Here be monsters Nicola Moffat

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hy is The Knitting Map still important? The essays that we have gathered here (remembering that, like stitches, people can be gathered) demonstrate the Map’s critical importance, but also its social, artistic and material importance. Because of its many meanings, the authors of this book have found themselves mimicking, in a way, the Map’s performativity, unable to remain strictly academic in their writing; and so, the essays incorporate memoir, biography, letters, poetry, reportage, interviews, photography and storytelling. Each mode of telling, moreover, has its critical importance, especially regarding the making of meaning – of the Map’s meaning, but also in a wider sense of understanding how it is that meaning is made and the world mapped into easily definable areas of knowledge. The thread that winds its way through each chapter, stringing together these remarkable pearls (or purls) of wisdom, is, of course, The Knitting Map, but there are also other threads present, intertwining and co-mingling, explaining and simultaneously disrupting the Map, its making, and its trace. As Jools noted in the run-up to the 2015 Symposium, the “story of what happened to the map is as much a part of the meaning of the map as the map itself” (qtd. in English, 2015). It is this Map, the knitted remains of Cork City of Culture 2005, its different strands of meaning and its legacy, that we weave together here. What is, or was, The Knitting Map? These essays attempt in their individual ways to give it body, grappling with the many voices that have gone into its making and into making its meaning, exploring its conception, its birth, its brief life and its (un)death. Arguably, part of the Map’s importance is its continued resistance to categorization, its resistance to embodying a rigorously defined meaning: the Map is and was a community

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arts project, a testament to women’s cultural work, the outline of a choreographic score, a memory bank of life stories; it is a material object, but it is also a ghost, and one which summons our own personal ghosts when we are in its presence; it is both the thing itself and its remains. It is because of such resistance to categorization that The Knitting Map can be viewed as monstrous. While it may seem odd to describe The Knitting Map as monstrous—it is, after all, a community project that was knitted chiefly by older women from a small city in Southern Ireland—it can be argued that the Map’s monstrosity is precisely the reason why it continues to be important. Monsters don’t arrive for the fun of it (or, as we say in Cork, “for the craic”). Monsters, by their very definition, arrive as warnings or signs pointing towards an unknown future (‘monster,’ from the Latin monstrum, meaning portent, sign, or omen), and thus cannot be ignored. Monsters are also creatures traditionally viewed with suspicion, dread, and awe because they defy societal rules and transgress the boundaries to which we typically adhere, including the boundaries of time and meaning. Jacques Derrida characterizes the monster as an unknown thing that unexpectedly arrives at the shoreline or doorway (limn), defying meaning, destabilizing defined categories, and confounding ways of knowing particular to a community; it is a “formless form” (Derrida, 1989: 80) that is “unnameable because it is unknowable; it def[ies] semantics as much as ontology” (Derrida 1994: 6). The Knitting Map arrived in Cork by way of its monstrous birth in the crypt of St. Luke’s Church, resisting meaning by confounding local modes of knowledge and destabilizing the apparent fixity of the local population’s preconceptions regarding cartography, art, performance, women’s crafts, individualism, community work, status, funding and labour. The monster only ceases to be strange, to be unknowable, once it has suitably adapted its environment into something habitable; as Derrida notes, it can, at first, “only be mis-known (méconnue), that is, unrecognized and misunderstood. It can only be recognized afterwards, when it has become normal or the norm” (1989: 79). In the thirteen years since The Knitting Map’s conception, has Cork become a place in which this monster may now be welcomed? The jury is still out, but what is evident is a continued adaptation of the city into something other than what it was in its City of Culture year. This transformation has occurred in part due to The Knitting Map, where its presence – lurking just out of earshot, in the corner of the eye – marks perhaps a time when the city might become its home. That time is not, however, this time. For now, we must continue to be haunted by this great woolly apparition, as it clamors its dissatisfaction from storage in nearby Kinsale, Co. Cork. The chapters in this collection all interact with the Map’s monstrosity, whether or not this is explicitly realized by each author. Joanne Turney, for instance, notes that the Map, as well as the act and product of knitting themselves, can be viewed as instances of the “monstrous feminine”, which Barbara Creed explains as the mutability, lack and excesses of (and symbolized by) the female form (1993). The subversiveness of knitting and knitted objects within the context of Contemporary Art, where knitting refuses to remain the homely craft of the domestic sphere and instead invades the public (masculine) arena of High Art, is also discussed by Turney, as well as by Lucy Lippard, Fionna Barber and Jessica Hemmings in their chapters. For Rachel Andrews,

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the transgression of feminine crafts into the public realm remains a source of discomfort, where she links these homely arts to the subordination of women and their relegation into domesticity, and her chapter reflects on the painful memories of being forced to knit as a school girl in an Ireland that deemed this her only suitable work. Andrews’ recollections of this early rejection of feminine craft is interwoven with an analysis of the Irish media’s reaction to The Knitting Map, both during its Culture year and afterwards, where she pointedly warns against viewing ‘the’ media as singular, and reminds us that, like Mary Shelley’s famous monster, it is an assemblage of disparate parts. Sarah Foster’s chapter also interacts with the media’s criticism of the City of Culture project, connecting the frustration and disappointment of Cork’s citizenry with the overall management of the Culture year to the scapegoating of the Map. Both Andrews and Foster quote Katie Mythen’s derisive Inside Cork opinion piece, which names the Map an “absolute Frankensteinesque creation” (2005), using Mythen’s disparagement as an indication of the media’s and the public’s view of the project. Like Turney, Foster links this to the public’s perception of artistic value, where knitting is viewed as outdated, silly and embarrassing, and not at all worthy either of funding or being taken seriously as art. That Mythen explicitly links the Map to monstrosity is, however, interesting, especially considering the particular monster to which she refers. While The Knitting Map’s patchworked appearance certainly recalls Frankenstein’s careful suturing of the many different body parts that constitute his creation, Mythen’s comparison is unwittingly correct: not realizing that her reasons for rejecting the Map are akin to humankind’s rejection of the Creature, Mythen cannot see that neither the Map’s nor the Creature’s monstrosity is innate, but rests instead on the misconceptions of those who come into contact with it. Deborah Barkun’s chapter illustrates this neatly by contrasting reactions by the media and public in Ireland with those abroad. Barkun charts The Knitting Map’s only journey away from Cork, to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in 2007, intertwining this with a critical evaluation of the Map’s reported “loss” in 2012, which she reads as an attempted erasure of the Map and a fate typical of women’s art. Here, The Knitting Map’s monstrosity is due not only to its excess (being both gargantuan of size and an excessively feminine transgression of the traditionally masculine arena of art), but also to its lack, which Barkun presents as its alleged loss – a hole in its own narrative. Both Richard Povall and Róisín O’Gorman, meanwhile, point out the Map’s Cyborgian elements, demonstrating that its monstrosity also lies in its birth, which was animated by combining the materiality of wool with the technologies of CCTV, cartography, and meteorology. The Cyborg is a familiar figure in Popular Culture and has been since the publication of Frankenstein (1818); its monstrosity lies in its hybrid form, where it disturbs the boundaries between the corrosiveness of flesh and the apparent immutability of machines, between the material and the immaterial. What survives of The Knitting Map, that is, its woollen archive, may also one day succumb to the ravages of time, which is, I think, why we attempt to record its journey here, digitally and in print. As Peggy Phelan writes, “[a]t the heart of mimicry is a fear that the match will not hold and the ‘thing itself’ (you, me, love, art) will disappear before we can reproduce it. So we hurl ourselves headlong toward copy machines, computers, newspapers, cloning labs” (1997: 12). The Map’s

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hybridity is also made manifest by the multiplicity of its birth, where literally thousands of hands helped to deliver it, and this is reflected by the varied responses in this book to the Map as both object and signifier – because, of course, any map can be considered as both of these things. For O’Gorman, the Map archives a complicated choreography, one which was performed unwittingly by the public in 2005 – another reason, perhaps, why the people of Cork feel haunted by the Map, as it charts the unpracticed steps we danced during its Culture year. Povall’s essay maps a more personal choreography through his journey as one half of half/angel, the performance company responsible for the Map’s conceptualization, and beyond, finding his own wings steady for further flight into his career as a digital artist. The implied infinity of the digital, as well as its cost-effectiveness means that fewer and fewer material objects need to be produced—among them books, music recordings, film, and maps—especially where the object’s materiality is generally not thought to be necessary to its use. The Knitting Map has invited many of this book’s authors to reflect on the materiality of objects such as maps, especially regarding the ‘use’ of these material items in relation to both their and our physical transience. Thus, Kieran McCarthy’s chapter explores the different meanings The Knitting Map’s makers have ascribed to material objects such as those that make up a landscape or a city’s topography, as well as those that form our more immediate surroundings at home and at work, and includes testaments of the knitters’ material connections to Cork City and County and to the knitted garments they have made. Both Hemmings’ and Turney’s chapters argue for the importance of material objects in making and maintaining bonds between people, singularly and as communities, while my own navigates between the loss of materiality and its ghostly remains when a loved one dies. Like the physical vestiges left by those we love once they have passed on, The Knitting Map is at once material and immaterial, at once present and absent, its materiality haunting us by acting as a supplement for the bodies we’ve lost. Speaking of this kind of haunting, Derrida writes that “the specter is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. It becomes, rather, some ‘thing’ that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other” (1994: 6). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen explains that the same (im)materiality can be applied to monsters, where “[n]o monster tastes of death but once. The anxiety that condenses like green vapor into the form of the vampire can be dispersed temporarily, but the revenant by definition returns. And so the monster’s body is both corporeal and incorporeal; its threat is its propensity to shift” (1996: 5). The Map’s monstrosity thus lies not only in its hybrid birth, but also in its undeath, being both corporeal and ghostly and refusing to remain buried in its own “controversial” past. That it spent part of its time resting in the old city morgue, awaiting resurrection for its gallery debut, is an irony not lost on us. The Map’s simultaneous materiality and evanescence permitted it to archive and, indeed, to map its very processes, which Gilson notes allowed us space to be playful with how cartographic energies depict all kinds of geographies, from the tone of laughter of the cartographer, to how Mary was

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late on that Tuesday, to the vast impossible secrets of the complexity of knitting, to the floods in March, and the snow in November, and the heat of August, and the lull in October, to Ciara’s poor tension, and Maura’s cable, and nobody cleaned the toilets on Sunday so I had to do it before I could change the wool for Monday, to the valuing of women’s lives and community . . . (2012: 8-9). Evanescence is crucial to performance, and this is documented in Povall’s and O’Gorman’s essays, as well as Gilson’s. However, it is the stillness within movement that is best captured by Bernadette Sweeney, where she meditates on humanity’s desire to grasp the fleeting and the momentary (perhaps, if we can make something still, we can keep it here forever). So, the photographs Sweeney took to document Gilson’s performances during the Culture year remind us, just as The Knitting Map does, that life itself is fleeting – a series of dances, acts, and processes that are repeated, but by different performers. These processes are ongoing, mutating with each new stitch we learn about the creation of art, about community, about Cork, and about the increasing importance of women’s stories in the making of a progressive and Fair Isle. A quick note on the sea…. The Knitting Map, along with the threads it has gathered on its thirteen year journey, seems to have reminded many of this book’s writers of the sea. Indeed, one of its threads appears to be the sea, connecting these essays as the oceans connect the continents. Given its length and use of natural colours, it isn’t difficult to see why the sea is invoked by many of the essays, but I’d like to offer another reason for this similarity, which is that it has everything to do with monstrosity. This is to say that The Knitting Map has everything to do with the unknown, with wildness, adventure, and danger, and with all the possibilities that such things offer. The Map’s monstrosity lies in its very function as a map, as maps, like monsters, are signs, always already deflecting from their materiality, pointing towards an unknown future. The future to which The Knitting Map points remains on the horizon, but the chapters in this book go some way towards welcoming its possibilities.

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Navigation, nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map A series of navigational directions

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Jools Gilson

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his writing is a navigation of failures. The safe channels in an estuary are marked by buoys; keep the red buoy to port and the green to starboard, and you will travel safely. But I am compelled by the spaces outside of the publicly marked, and I wonder if it is possible to make it to harbour by other routes. Such heretic navigation promises possibility, but failure lurks under the surface. Such danger is profoundly part of the aspirant pedagogy I describe here, in which failure is itself a kind of buoy, one which tempts an exuberant buoyancy, as much as it threatens being lost at sea. So that it makes the best sense to speak of a pedagogy of failure, rather than the failure of pedagogy. This is a story about two publics; one involved in a vast collaborative knitting project, which used traditional as well as experimental gestures; the other a public who witnessed the same project through the media controversy that described it.

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The Knitting Map was a departure for us as a company; we had spent ten years making dance theatre and installation work. In The Knitting Map we proposed a work that we hoped could be a gift to the city that was my home, and which was designated as European Capital of Culture in 2005. But by a contingent of its Irish audience (the majority of whom never visited the work), this gift was unwanted. So here is the affect of failure: It hurts. It is an injury. But being on the whole a cheerful and hardy traveller, and having made such an impossibly huge map, I’m off to chart this story with all its complexities of nationality, femininity, fury and love.a We are called half/angel for a reason. The name is from a trapeze move, which I learnt when studying trapeze in the early 1990s. I loved it because one moment you are sitting prettily on the trapeze, with one hand grasping the bar, and the next you fall backwards holding on with that single grasped hand, and Figure 1.1  Women knitting The Knitting Map in the crypt of a flexed foot catches the place where wood and St Luke’s Church, Cork, Ireland, 2005. half/angel. rope meet. If it works you fly underneath the bar, and you are half an angel. I long for such falling and such flight; movements in which you have to fall in order to fly. So we are half/angels, creatures equally enamoured of falls and flights, knowing in our bones and blood that there is a way to fall into flight. But there are times when falling fails to turn into any kind of angel, even half of one. Learning this technique was a process of repeated indignity, training with a wide belt around our waist called a lunge. Should we fall, as we all do, our teacher pulls down hard on the lunge rope, so that we are caught, dangling in space. But we always try again, cajoled into ending with our (partial) angel intact. And in this way, failure is our guide. Being willing to fall is another. And so we fall into the prosaic and everyday. We fall into our first tangle, in which some contingents of the press, and many of our knitters, believe our project The Knitting Map to be about a literal mapping of Cork City. We are appalled, whilst many of our

a. 13th October, 2008 Dear Róisín, I’m writing this facing north, away from the sea, sitting in the study looking out over the spiral garden. The penstemons are still out in October, scarlet amidst the grey.

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knitters think of it as a lovely idea, and volunteer to knit particular parts of the city. Our understanding of processes of cartography assumed a poetic plurality. Our map wasn’t literal, because such literality would not have allowed us space to be playful with how cartographic energies depict all kinds of geographies, from the tone of laughter of the cartographer, to how Mary was late on that Tuesday, to the vast impossible secrets of the complexity of knitting, to the floods in March, and the snow in November, and the heat of August, and the lull in October, to Ciara’s poor tension, and Maura’s cable, and nobody cleaned the toilets on Sunday so I had to do it before I could change the wool for Monday, to the valuing of women’s lives and community, to the ferocity of some of the press, to people crossing oceans solely to visit us, to indignant men arriving surprised at quiet industry, to the way we laughed so hard we wet our knickers at Elizabeth’s leaving do, to the neighbours getting upset, to drums playing, and scones being eaten, to fury and love, and tears, and tension of all kinds, and love, and love. And women in Philadelphia weeping at the sight of it. How could we map that with something that was just a picture that imagined streets to stay in orderly parallels, and suburbs to remain peripheral, and all of that? And whilst we sat appalled, we began to understand that imagination is a privilege of unparalleled proportions, far beyond the material privations that play themselves out in the lives of too many of us. To be able to be playful with imaginative possibilities is to believe in different kinds of worlds. The vision of The Knitting Map – the women of a city rising up and knitting the weather for a year, has a revolutionary gesture at its core. Its poetic motion sought to find a quiet but profound way to give space to the astonishing in the everyday of so much feminine activity. It sought to give space to a profound politics of care, to ask if skills normally used for gift giving and solace, could be used for something of vast collaborative gorgeousness, something whose use-value (a thing that would so often trouble our critics and collaborators alike) was both poetic and political. A small boat under oars need show only a lantern or electric torch in sufficient time to prevent collision. RYA International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (Anderson 1995: 18c)

Reverse Stocking Stitch Check in Nutmeg. Quiet. Sister Susan and the girls from Knocknaheeny. The Knitting Map Log (2005: 7 June)

Holding on to my trapeze with a clasped hand and readying my flexed foot, I drop backwards. And my repeated tangling with rope and wood is still happening when I sit down and knit in this cacophony of knitting that is The Knitting Map. Here I am falling, and whilst failure attends my learning and my teaching, I am brave enough to carry on catching wool and knitting needles like a trapeze move, but this time, it is the hundreds of women who visit daily who perform stunts between their dextrous arms and fingers, and the twine of wool. And they come with us to risk flight.

Chapter 1  Navigation, nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map   3

Risking flightb In half/angel’s project The Knitting Map, digital codes were written to translate information about how busy Cork City was, into knitting stitches, and what the weather was like, into wool colour. This information was uploaded to digital screens as a simple knitting pattern (knit this stitch in this colour), and volunteer knitters sat at twenty knitting stations in a wooden amphitheatre in the crypt of St. Luke’s Church and knitted. And they did this every day for a year. (Barkun, Gilson-Ellis & Povall 2007: 13–14) The technology that was part of imagining The Knitting Map had been part of half/ angel’s performance and installation practice for ten years prior to 2005. This work with technology allowed us to haunt performance and installation with unsettling connections between gestures and voiced text or music. In The Lios (2004), gallery visitors moved their hands in pools of water to trigger recordings of a community remembering the sea, as if memory itself were dissolved in water. In The Secret Project (1999), dancers moved and spoke poetic texts whilst producing another layer of the same text with their movement, so that they and the audience became unsettled by a vocal and corporeal plurality, and time itself seemed troubled. If we had not spent a decade refining this kind of work we could not have imagined The Knitting Map, in which a city and its weather generated knitting stitches and wool colour. The Knitting Map, then, involved the culturally disenfranchised in the making of a vast artwork that was commissioned (and certainly perceived) as a flagship project for Cork’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2005. Poetically and politically it was a work that sought to rework the urban territory of matter and meaning: knitting was used as something Figure 1.2  Edge shot of The Knitting Map, from an exhibimonumental – an abstract cartography of Cork tion at Millennium Hall, Cork, Ireland 2006. half/angel. b. 27th November, 2008 Dear Róisín, a north wind today, fierce as a slap, whipping up clouds with brilliant sunshine, so that pushing the buggy up the boreen with my new son, I am faced with a wide sky tumbled grey and white, sun on the hay field, with its abandoned cylinders of straw, and the brilliant green of the fields around here. I am ravished by colour, and the gorgeous simplicity of pushing my child up a muddy lane, for a walk on a wild day. But as he sleeps, I slip away quietly, and write.

Textiles, Community and Controversy    4

generated by the city itself and its weather, and knitted every day for a year. To make such a gesture using feminine and female labour aspired to rework the relationship between femininity and power in an Irish context – it gave cartographic authority to working-class older women from Cork, for a year. The process of conjuring the energies of a city’s climate into an abstract cartography meant that in an important sense the women involved in making The Knitting Map were knitting the weather. Such a communal gesture brought frosts and floods, and heat into the domestic and ordinary act of knitting. It opened its close, domestic and feminine associations to the literal and metaphorical sky. The Knitting Map also allowed the mathematical complexity of knitting difficult stitches to be brought into proximity to a frantic city, clogged with traffic and queues, and crowded streets. In keeping track of shifting numerical combinations to produce, for example, an open honeycomb cable,2 these women reworked the actual digital information about busyness being sent up to them from the city, and they did so by integrating this data with their hands (their digits) in processes of communal hand-knitting. The Knitting Map allowed the prevailing cultural peripherality of middle-aged women to make a collectively original and beautiful thing, and in doing so remapped their own apparently tangential geography.3 Tidal streams flow towards a direction. Winds flow from a direction. Navigation: An RYA Manual (Culiffe 1992: 102)

Tw2RW: Slip next stitch onto cable needle and leave at back of work, knit one, then purl one through back of loop from cable needle. Debbie Bliss, How to Knit (1999: 158)

Yacht masterc I am a Yacht Master, but I cannot sail. I have a certificate from the Royal Yachting Association with my name on it. I have only once been in a yacht, and when we were out at sea, dolphins suddenly surrounded us – they were underneath us, and leaping beside us. They wove such playful curves again and again, that I was undone with the joy of it, stumbling from one side of the small boat to the other to look at them. The old man I sailed with had sailed all his life, and had never seen such a performance. In class I had become enchanted with extraordinary maps of the sea called charts, and a new language: ‘chart datum’, ‘dead reckoning’, ‘isolated danger mark’. We learned about meteorology,

c. 18th January, 2009 Dear Róisín, I’m writing this facing south, close to the wood burning stove in the Swallow House, on an icy day in January. Through a little window to the right of the stove, I can see the sea above a stone wall I built two summers ago. Counting summers in the frost, I navigate my writing to meet its heart.

Chapter 1  Navigation, nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map   5

navigation and collision regulations. I took notes and drew coloured diagrams. And when it came to the exam, I got the best mark in the class. But as I say, I cannot sail, but I am a Yacht Master. And all of my hankering for navigation of one sort or another is held within this story of respected qualification and unexpected marine joy. What more could I ever master about being in a vessel in the sea than those creatures sent leaping in my heart? So I came to The Knitting Map already enchanted with navigation. Making a map seemed an ordinary and straightforward thing to me. Making such a map out of wool, with the collaboration of several thousand women, and information about the weather and city busyness as its enervating cartography, seemed a sensible sort of gesture. I love maps because they purport to tell you how to get somewhere, which seems to me ridiculous. Getting somewhere is always a conundrum of analysis and surprise, rain and strange forks in the road cloud one’s vision as a matter of course. We all lose our way, even when we arrive safely in good time. So it isn’t that I am suspicious of maps, it’s just that for me, maps and charts are delicious in their ability to resist and recoil and affirm our ability to get to a destination. I am a Yacht Master, but I cannot sail. And when I try to learn, dolphins assault my attempt in playful cacophonies of curves. Marine joy. But I love charts, and I can plot a course for you if I have the strength of the prevailing wind, and the times of high tide, and I know who should give way if two vessels meet, but I have never done these things with real boats. So what kind of navigator does this make me? And what kind of cartographer?

Figure 1.3  Exhibition of The Knitting Map, The Ganser Gallery, Millersville University, Pennsylvania, USA, 2007. half/angel. Textiles, Community and Controversy    6

Good navigation can be achieved only by experience. Imaginary passages worked on the dining room table, help to build up speed and proficiency in chart work, but they cannot be a substitute for practice at sea . . . Practice does not make the waves any smaller, the driving spray less penetrating or the motion less violent . . . Navigation: An RYA Manual (Culiffe 1994:12)

Practice at sea Not everyone shares my irreverence of pictorial topography, and all kinds of maps that I assumed failed me as I brought my wickedry out from its poetic enclave and onto the street. Others often assume that maps will have a direct relationship to the layout of their referents. So it was that along with some of our knitters, a gleeful Irish press assumed that because The Knitting Map mapped the city, that it would be literal; one in which the shapes of streets, and the actual place of the river would be reproduced, so that they could have a fine joke on our behalf and conject about what would happen if someone dropped a stitch: ‘What worries me is that if one of them drops a stitch, there goes Knocknaheeny’ (Buckley 2004: 11). Knocknaheeny isn’t a neutral suburb in this jest – it is on the north side of Cork, and a byword for poverty, crime and violence. Yarn overs are most commonly used in lace patterns where you are creating a hole by making up stitches where some have been lost by working them together. Debbie Bliss, How to Knit (1999: 99)

Enchantmentd Knitting is an enchantment of the hands and fingers, a moving latticework of wool and winding and tension. So that in our hands we see complexities fall away from us as something that is parochially called knitting. But in the secret glad grins we share when no one’s watching and the gentleness of being guided into the mathematical intricacies of this unsettling and enchanting craft of the hands, we learn differently. Apparently, we do nothing, sitting there, chatting away, breaking for coffee and scones, but something is telling in the eagerness with which we get back to our labour of textiles and hands and fingers and wool. Tangling affect with yarn and needles we trace and make our connection through story, gossip, argument and laughter.

d. 20th January, 2009 Dear Róisín, today an African American man will be inaugurated as President of the United States of America, and I am sitting in front of the warming stove in the Swallow House writing to you. There is a heavy frost, and I can still see my breath inside this little writing house. I ran in the twilight this morning. My hands moving towards the pain of cold before my beating heart warmed them again.

Chapter 1  Navigation, nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map   7

And let me tell you about the densities of colour, the drench of lilac drifting up from the crypt floor. They call it Amethyst and Heather, and here it is turned into the dimensional hexagons of a honeycomb cable, or the tiny one-by-one cables running like orderly veins into basket weaves, and then shifting into the duskiness of Devon Blue, and here again drifting into the virtuosity of a moss zigzag – seed textures jumping sideways and back again. These mauves and muted blues intensify Figure 1.4  Jools Gilson preparing The Knitting when the weather is wet and wild, so that the finished Map for exhibition in the Ganser Gallery, map has swathes of such colours marking the storms Millersville University, Pennsylvania, USA, 2007. half/angel. of April 2005, their texture, their organisation of knots made by the movement of the city itself, pedestrian and motor without distinction. So that busy Saturdays in midsummer send us cabling like nobody’s business, and quiet wet Wednesdays have us mossing our single knit and single pearl, row after row, with contemplative ease. As we knit rain, lilacs attend our labour. And what seems like a hundred tones of creams, light browns and greys; Glencoe, Ivory Cream, Naturelle, Sand, Nutmeg, Cinnamon, Biscuit, Stone, Putty, Sandstorm, Storm Cloud. They are called neutrals, but they are not. Tiny threads of grey-black in white, perfect cream, something darker; the warmth and muted pinkness of Nutmeg and Cinnamon. I turn in their heft, day after day. And the greens – a milky aquamarine, something grassy, and another tinged with khaki. I am ravished by colour, and I see the same happen sometimes inside visitors, the shock of moving from the damp dark entrance, into the light and labour of the work itself. It happens like a kiss, or rain. It is before language, even as I try to write it. It is colour and vastness and the shocking apprehension that it has been knitted by hundreds and soon thousands of hands. In Philadelphia, Margaret and I sit amongst it, arranging the folds and drifts and enormity of its complexity. We do so shoeless and often choked up, crouching in the midst of it. There are drifts of it, up the walls, in pleated folds, and sometimes stretching wide and flat, and then rivulets dividing and meeting again. There is just so much of it, that it undoes people of their perception of hand-textiling. So that it is both an abundance of knitting and a cacophony of absence.4 A submarine carries its steaming lights much lower than a vessel of her size is required to do . . . at night this gives the impression that she is much further away than she actually is. Navigation: An RYA Manual (Culiffe 1994: 5)

Textiles, Community and Controversy    8

Cablese And here are knitting’s most precocious feats – the cable! Look! Here they are tumbling; complex arrays of plaits and twists, wide and narrow beside each other, racing to the finish, their mossed foregrounds and stockinged backgrounds, blurring in the thrill of the chase. O! The twist and the turn! The leap and the dive-behind! The gymnastics of yarn, tempted into dashing frivolity by urbanity itself! And yet, and yet – the choreography of the cable is not the same kind of darling for digital technologies at all! The digerati are irritated by cabling, longing to hide it away, keep it secret, or even be done with it altoFigure 1.5  Close up of The Knitting Map. half/angel. gether. When the President of Ireland chose to visit The Knitting Map, detectives came ahead of her to search our space – the crypt of St Luke’s Church. They chuckled politely when I told them that we were glad they’d come because knitting can be very dangerous. But the really funny thing, is that they thought I was joking. And then I unlocked the door that led behind the wooden amphitheatre, so that they could inspect the underside of the wooden circle where we knitted, and where Richard had hidden all the cables from the digital screens that brought the information about what knitting pattern to stitch and what colour yarn to use, into the hands of our knitters. The detectives walked along the wooden curve, and stared at the cacophony of cabling, coloured leads from ten computers leading to ten screens, each computer being fed information from Richard’s digital hub, which itself received information from four city centre CCTV cameras (for the complexity of stitch), and our weather station (for the colour). Two detectives in suits stare at hundreds of cables curling into their sockets, and others leaping away irreverently to hard drives placed in an unruly line, and more still feeding the digital screens on the amphitheatre, and others again escaping away altogether. Momentarily, two detectives with little wires behind their ears, teeter on their heels, at this sudden spectacle of convoluted complexity beneath the quiet line of women knitting above. I offer them tea, which they politely refuse, but my question brings them to their senses, and they briskly walk along the curved space, before leaving our underworld to check for rain. e. 23rd January, 2009 Dear Róisín, today it is bright and still. There is a wet chill in the air, and I write this facing West. It is a little warmer than when I last wrote, so I can sit at the table in the Swallow House. Today, Vittorio came out whilst I dressed the children and lit the stove for me. It is burning peat, old natural peat, not the polite brickettes you can buy from supermarkets. So I sit facing West in the little writing house with a view of blue sky and an empty raised bed, a naked damson tree and a tumbled stone wall. And I burn Irish earth to keep warm. Ancient Irish earth, burning slowly.

Chapter 1  Navigation, nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map   9

You are a skipper of a yacht at anchor in Dover in 6.0m depth of water. It is Mean High Water Neap. A crew member drops a winch handle overboard. What will be the depth at Low Water when you send him down to get it? RYA Coastal Skipper & Yachtmaster Offshore Exercises (1995/6: 4)

Plotf I plotted. I did plot. There was plotting, and it fell – fat plots from a grey sky, dashing us with hope. Can you hear it falling? Hope plots. Hundreds of them, thousands even, going out of focus in the movements of fingers winding wool, and shaking the balls of yarn to give them more leverage, in the counting of stitches, in the placing of wool between needles, in its being pulled back, tucked under, in its being wound around, in its being left off to pick up later, in its cabling. O how we cabled! Can you see my plot now? Can you hear the sound of plotting? What a course I navigated! What a plot! I am cabling internationally! In and out and winding behind. I haven’t lost the plot. At all. Double moss in storm cloud (a kind of grey). Busy. Normal Monday group and school visit. The Knitting Map Log (2005: 18 April)

Speculative practice Slowly, over ten years, Richard Povall and I (the directors of half/angel) learnt how to do something in our art practice that was based on radical and irreverent speculation. This was a kind of improvisation with failure as a professional practice. We both needed its possibility, and like children, didn’t believe in it. Developing impossibilities was the core of such work, in which we developed ways to imagine dissolving memory in water (tiny sensors in pools of water triggering recorded samples of a community remembering the ocean), or projecting poetic text onto falling rice or haunting spaces with voice ghosts that moving figures might find (The Secret Project [1999], Spinstren [2002] and The Lios f. 26th January, 2009 Dear Róisín, the fire difficult to light this morning here in the Swallow House. Everything a bit damp. The orange peel we dried to parchment to use as firelighters in the house, have taken in moisture, and feel like peel again. I’m facing north to warm my back close to the stove. At least I can’t see my breath any more. The children have colds – chesty coughs and runny noses, so we had a broken night last night, Jacobo with me, and Vittorio sleeping downstairs near to Natalie. I had soft hair rubbed in my face at 3am, as a little boy giggled for glee that he was in bed with me. I am also full of cold, and battling it with Echinacea and blood oranges. Peter Foynes and Vittorio made marmalade yesterday, so that our kitchen was turned into a citrus sauna, as they tried to boil Seville oranges for hours on our cantankerous stove, which loses heat in the wind. Later Peter and I go down to the sea wall to see if we can see a date Toddy assures us he knows is there. But there is nothing but a wild grey sea, so that as we stand on the beach we gaze into a wall of grey amidst a pinkish afternoon glow.

Textiles, Community and Controversy    10

[2004]). So that imagining the women of a city rising up and knitting the weather and movement of a city for a year did not seem an unusual thing, it only seemed grander in scale and time. And our project didn’t stay either in the space of poetic language or in the world of conceptual art practice (as either dance theatre or installation), but instead strode boldly into the space of the actually popular and a real community both of knitters and of Cork City. We strode blindly, because we had learnt to trust such speculation as a sturdy beginning for our work. All of our work began with a poetic idea nudging technology sideways. We had always not known how our practice would ‘work’, but we perennially rode on the tide of its poetic core, and found a way. We were fluent at listening to our process without demanding a result too quickly. The Knitting Map was different in this sense, because we were unable to rehearse the twin processes of collating city data/translating into a knitting pattern, and the organisation of a community of knitters. We had to spend part of the year of The Knitting Map’s making developing the process of its making; there was no rehearsal, or residential retreat. The idea that we might develop how the project would work technically and administratively during its year of making was enormously challenging to some of our staff and volunteers. Some of them equated not knowing exactly how everything would work from day one with weak management. Their model of hierarchical organisation was sometimes powerfully entrenched. Working with speculative technology over a decade in collaboration with Richard meant that we developed digital systems that were an idea of what might work. These were systems that might only become fully themselves through practice, through processes in which we often failed, but that used such failure as buoys; as critical markers that allowed us to navigate towards what we yearned to make. We were fortunate during the 1990s to have long-term residencies, which allowed us to develop such art and performance practice over weeks and months.5 This was powerfully embodied work, with each performance system being ‘tuned’ to the movement of a particular dancer. As privileged and educated artist scholars, our corporeal and linguistic discourse was developed in the havens of contemporary art practice, and within the theoretical playgrounds of postmodern thought. We have always been nomadic with our disciplinary boundaries, deeply interested in the ways in which form binds up meaning or sets it free, and so, transgressing another disciplinary border and venturing in such ambitious optimism out of the worlds of literature and conceptual performance practices, and into the everyday, seemed another leap like so many we had taken before. But we were mistaken in this. g Richard and I brought our nuanced collaborative skills to The Knitting Map project, and watched as they slowly failed. Invisibly but palpably, more popularly accepted g. 28th January, 2009 Dear Róisín, facing East into a misted up window. It’s mild, so I sit without my coat at my desk with the lamp on, breathing into this precious space of writing and solitude. And for the first time this week, I can’t see my breath. Yesterday I took the children to play group in Aghada looking out onto a glassy estuary across to Cobh. Natalie played happily with buggies and babies, and eventually accosted a real baby from a mum to sit on her lap. Jacobo drove the red car he adores and then sat and ate his snack before and after every other child . . . Later Natalie is exuberant at Anna Beth’s house singing out songs loudly with Fifi, as the three of them parade round the kitchen island. Anna Beth and I conspire to catch-up between bouts of nappy changing, snack fetching and refereeing.

Chapter 1  Navigation, nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map   11

structures of relating made themselves felt. We began to understand that what we did was not that understandable. Bemused by the complexity of the project itself, the fact that its participants were largely middleaged working-class women, and the several hundred thousand euro that funded it, the local and national press began to snarl, at the same time as international visitors and press were often enchanted by the scale, democracy and aspiration of the work.6

Figure 1.6  Regular knitters at The Knitting Map in the crypt of St Luke’s Church, Cork, Ireland, 2005. half/angel.

White over red over red over red indicates a vessel constrained by her draught and thus severely restricted in her ability to deviate from her course. RYA International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (Anderson 1995: 24)

Whilst some of our staff and knitters would not or could not collaborate with us in understanding and communicating the speculative and open-ended nature of The Knitting Map, we also began to learn that this didn’t matter in such a project, in the critical ways it had driven our small-scale performance and installation work. The work operated on different levels for different people. Our error, our failure, was to assume that we could collaborate with a city and a community using similar skills that we had honed in the retreats of contemporary art practice. Community is messy and disorderly, as are the cities they compose. We came to accept that what happened during our year of knitting was the project, and eventually to understand that such an audacious work could not have been completed without struggle and challenge. Sound in fog may travel erratically causing some confusion and anxiety if the limitations in picking up fog signals are not understood. Navigation: An RYA Manual (Culiffe 1994: 79)

Textiles, Community and Controversy    12

Knitterly knowledgeh Our knowledges of playful plurality, of symbolic and literal empowerment, of making women the custodians of a wildly ambitious cartography, were not ideas that were easy to communicate, and yet many of these knitters understood their participation as a civic contribution of great material and symbolic worth.7 For many of these women, their involvement in The Knitting Map was their first involvement in an arts project. Whilst the context and aspiration of this work may have been difficult to grasp, these women drove the project with skills that were powerfully familiar to them – knitting, and the social ability to make space warm and unthreatening. Many of them knew far more about knitting than either Richard or I. We had experienced performance and installation works that felt powerfully challenging and difficult to visit, even to the initiated. We wanted to make the space of The Knitting Map welcoming and inclusive, and our formidable group of knitters were as skilled at this aspect of the work as they were with knitting. This hosting of the work, this bringing of people in, showing and explaining the work, this offer to participate, to have tea, structured the form of the work as powerfully as the knitting itself. Loom is defined as the diffused glow observed from a light below the horizon owing to atmospheric scattering. Navigation: An RYA Manual (Culiffe 1994: 76)

The women who knitted The Knitting Map knew how to read and break code into a complexity that made singular things (sweaters, hats, blankets, scarves . . .). They knew about the social value of gift giving, they knew the weight of time and care intrinsic to the knitting of garments and other textiles. They also knew its bad press, its lodgement in the public psyche as a joke about another appalling sweater made by granny as a Christmas gift. Many of them had experienced the shift of knitting from economic necessity to expensive hobby. They also knew of knitting as a solitary activity, even as they might knit

h. 30th January, 2009 Dear Róisín. Rain. No writing yesterday because Vittorio had to go into work, and it was Thursday, so there was the Cuidiu (Irish Childbirth Trust) coffee morning. I’ve been secretly calling it Quidditch, because parenting seems just like playing hockey in three dimensions on a broom. There were fresh scones and jam and cream and tea, and the children disappeared off to play in another new play room. And lovely women, and much laughter. Somewhere in the blur of Quidditch, lunch with two toddlers in a café, shopping for supper, and all the hauling in and out of cars that that entails, I wrenched my shoulder muscles, somewhere deep inside. So I’m sitting here writing with a heat pad on my sore shoulder listening to the rain and writing to you. I’ve just re-lit the fire because it went out. Rain.

Chapter 1  Navigation, nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map   13

whilst watching television with others. In their bones, they knew of knitting as profoundly feminine, as the domain of the female, so that even as boys and men might knit, they only did so with a troubling frisson.8 They knew about the critical importance of tea breaks and lunch. They knew how to talk and laugh and sometimes guffaw. They also knew how to defend their beloved project when it was attacked, which it repeatedly was. They called up talk shows and spoke their minds, they demanded journalists and directors of festivals visit The Knitting Map for themselves (often after they had criticised the project without doing so), they wrote letters and knocked on doors. They disarmed us of intent, by acting as if they owned the project, which of course, they did. ‘An Army of Knutters’ (Mythen 2005: 10)

Debates about The Knitting Map rattled on in the Irish media for months and years (2003–2015), and came quite soon to repeatedly refer to the project as ‘controversial’, something that floored my colleagues and I, as well as our community of knitters. The Knitting Map was blatantly not itself the site of conventional controversy; its directors had not used the public funding as security on a loan to buy land, or embezzled it to pay for holidays, cars or jewellery; the project involved no public slaughtering of chickens, child pornography or vile language. What then, had failed in this process of public pedagogy? ‘. . . a useless monstrosity’ (Mythen 2005: 10)

There are two things that are remarkable about this response to The Knitting Map; first that the project was not in any way conventionally controversial in itself and second that this response was peculiar to Cork and Ireland. ‘daft’ (Mick Hannigan, former director of Cork Film Festival, quoted in Lynch 2005: 25)

But controversy there was. This was fuelled by angry speculation about the level of The Knitting Map’s funding. We received €258,000 over three years to realise this project, funding that primarily paid for a staff of five, office rental and the renovation, fitting out and running of an arts centre for a year. We were forbidden by our funders to reveal the level of this funding to the media during the years of its development and making, a gesture that fuelled speculation and controversy.9 But this was not the whole story.10 The negative media on The Knitting Map so rarely referred to the actual work itself that it sometimes seemed as if it had nothing to do with it. It was as if the latticework of meanings that The Knitting Map laid down in public met with social, political and

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historical moment in such a way as to allow something difficult and damaged to see the light of day. And this something was about Cork and Ireland in 2005, about the powerful injuries of history, about the troubled relationship to wealth, and about who has public permission to be valued and to be an artist. ‘a pack of oul’ biddies knitting’ (Lynch 2005: 26)

The public alchemy of The Knitting Map within Cork and Ireland was not what I had anticipated. What I had imagined was still within the work, available to be witnessed; gentle, slow; tangling tides and skies with yarn; marking the ebb and surge of presence with knots. But within Ireland, a different kind of alchemy attended its production. The scale, duration and femininity of The Knitting Map became a provocation. Metaphors are kinds of magic tricks; they work by something being able to represent something else. One of the reasons that the temporal, spatial and gendered excess of The Knitting Map were intolerable within an Irish context, was because of the failure of metaphor. For a contingent of an Irish audience and the Irish media, women knitting cartographies couldn’t mean anything else except ‘a pack of oul’ biddies knitting’ (Lynch 2005: 26). If you see an old woman in a fairy tale, be very very careful. Jools Gilson-Ellis, Spinstren, dance theatre production, 2002

I have often tried to make the invisible labour of femininity powerfully present; in 1997, I hung 10,000 sewing needles from red thread from a gallery ceiling (mouthplace exhibition, Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, with Richard Povall). The response to this work was oddly gendered: many women wondered out loud about the vastness of the labour of threading so many needles, and those men who visited wondered more quietly about what they perceived as the violence of the work. Kieran McCarthy, a local historian, published a book in 2005 based on interviews with people who worked on or were connected with The Knitting Map, called The Knitting Map Speaks (McCarthy 2005). This is an important document, and in it, one of the commissioners of the work, the Irish poet Tom McCarthy, reflects on the media controversy: Historically, The Knitting Map to me is also an important reminder of the importance of women’s work. I remember that during Cork 800 a fantastic anthology was brought together by the Cork Women’s Poetry Circle; it was called The Box Under the Bed. That work, which would be considered women’s work, was visible to the public eye and in many ways the story of women’s action in the city was anthologised. When that small anthology was published, it was attacked in the press. It was actually mocked. The Knitting Map, twenty years later, has also been subject to attack. It interests me about Irish and

Chapter 1  Navigation, nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map   15

Cork society that when women’s work is made visible, it somehow attracts negativity from sources in the media. Why is it that women’s activity attracts negative feeling in the media? (McCarthy, Tom 2005: 124) Removed of nuance, and bound up in the literal act of knitting, the most powerful response to The Knitting Map within Ireland was an astonishment that so much money and time had been dedicated to something that didn’t matter and was such an irrelevance. i

‘I’m sure it’s valid in its own way,’ concedes Mick Hannigan with a smile. (Lynch 2005: 26)

Because the project was a flagship one, this was also bound up with a powerful sense of not wanting to be represented internationally in this way.11 This may seem difficult to imagine outside of Ireland, but our failure to communicate the aspiration and layered meanings of this work to an Irish and especially a Cork audience meant that it remained lodged in understanding as literal knitting, and the association of homey craft with a bygone Ireland was something that was unbearable in a flagship project for Cork 2005. Historical moment did not or could not allow for such craft to be used as a way to radically rework meaning. The historic feminisation of Ireland by colonial Britain exacerbated this response.12 Having been symbolically female as a term of abuse, being represented internationally by an excess of femininity fuelled public rage. It did not help that both directors of the project (myself and Richard Povall) were English. What this work mapped then, was not so much a year in the life of a city, but its underlying injuries – symbolic, colonial and sexual. And its most powerful cartography was its iteration of old history, not as something ‘way back when’, but as something stridently present in the contemporaneity of 2005.j

i. 11th February, 2009 Dear Róisín, difficult to light the fire this morning. I am out of small logs, and so have to light the stove with peat. It burns slowly, reluctantly, sending smoke billowing sleepily over the fields. Stunning day – bright, still and cold. Madge, a neighbour and dear friend, died yesterday in her 98th year. She was born in this house in 1911 and we loved her, and her gorgeous dialect from another time, her stories about dancing down at the Lios, and her twinkling smile. j. 12th February, 2009 Dear Róisín, there is a touch of spring in the air today. Last night we waked Madge down at her home in Ballykennealy. I am taken through to the back bedroom where Catherine our beloved neighbour and friend, and Madge’s daughter sits close to the coffin. I hold her tight and sit between her sisters, and chat. I dash home for supper with the children, and then back again for the removal. The small cottage is heaving, and dozens of cars line the small road. I go inside briefly, and Richard hands me whisky. Later, sitting in the packed church, I look down the long aisle at Madge’s coffin to see the photograph of her I gave to Catherine for Christmas placed on top of it. This beautiful image of this old woman with light in her eyes sitting in my kitchen briefly undoes me of my outsider-ness.

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The Knitting Map, then, was a web that made the prevailing assumptions within Ireland about value, art, women and feminine labour visible and palpable. The Knitting Map made a space for older, working-class Irish women to make meaning, and the bad press in some sense tried to put them back in their place. But I have the knitting. Rolled up in four boxes, and hidden safely away in Cork. And I have taken it to America, where I unleashed it in a gallery. I watched as its alchemy crept up the spines of our visitors, I watched composure come undone. And it does this because it is a thing made slowly together (thousands of us), a feminine thing, it is time, time of seconds, and days and weeks and months and now years. And it is a kind of lodestone for potential time, and an assertion of unutterably powerful presence, so powerful that to bring it to the light of day, could cause a city, and sometimes a country, to rise up in fury. But I have it, and even though it isn’t mine, I guard it, because there will come a time when I will unroll it again. They didn’t know that she was female, all they knew was that the young sailor had a knack for using the chip log. Casting the wooden panel, weighted on one edge, out into the dark sea, she listened for the sound of it entering the water. As it did, she turned the hour-glass, and let the line slip through her dextrous fingers. She counted knots, watched the hour-glass, and listened to the gulls. She can smell tobacco, and knows they are watching her. And in this way, they knew how fast they travelled, and when they might arrive. And when they did arrive just as she had quietly predicted, they were unsettled, and glanced nervously at her slight figure looking out to sea. One knot equals one nautical mile per hour.

Chapter 1  Navigation, nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map   17

2

The entangled map and Irish art Fionna Barber

F

or some years after it was made as part of Cork’s year as European City of Culture (2005), The Knitting Map was safely stored away, its different sections enshrouded in polythene and placed in sealed caskets. It was first exhibited in Cork’s Millennium Hall (itself a part of the City Hall) in 2006, before travelling to the United States the following year. The Knitting Map’s next appearance in Cork was in 2015 in The Glucksman at University College Cork, where its installation was documented in a series of evocative images by university photographer Tomás Tyner. The work almost appears to have its own agency, a vast torrent of knitted fabric cascading down one wall and pooling its way across the floor. Blurring the boundaries between the internal and exterior spaces of the gallery, the ripples and folds of the Map’s materials flow right up to the windows, beyond which can be glimpsed a canopy of trees, their branches pressed insistently against the glass. As a viewer encountering The Knitting Map for the first time through these photographs, it was the sensuous embodiment of landscape that I found the most unexpected, combined with a suggestion of the material qualities of the wool itself: its smell, or its softness, or its wiriness. There are, however, other levels of meaning suggested by The Knitting Map’s extensive documentation: photographs of the knitters at work in St Luke’s Hall over the course

18

Figure 2.1  The Knitting Map at The Glucksman (Detail), 2015. Image courtesy of The Glucksman. Photograph by Tomás Tyner.

of the year it took to make this piece, many of which featured in media coverage, evoke a distinct sense of community as part of the process. For a viewer over a decade later, they offer the imaginative reconstruction of a communal activity – the constant clacking of needles, fragments of conversation and laughter, the smell and feel of wool transformed from looped skeins into a multicoloured fabric over long hours of shared labour. And even though the focus of this essay is on readings that derive from The Knitting Map’s gallery installation in 2015, the significance and value of its means of production are still interwoven within these. I begin with this mediated encounter with The Knitting Map, not because of any particular interest in fetishising the aesthetic qualities suggested within the photographs of its gallery display, but as a means of unlocking a range of meanings that help to situate the work within temporal accounts of Irish art, that should, in turn, contribute to an expanded sense of its significance. Relaunched as ‘The Knitting Map: Art, Community and Controversy 2005–2015’, the textile installation was the companion to another exhibition at The Glucksman. ‘Stitch in Time: The Fabric of Contemporary Life’, curated by Fiona Kearney and Chris Clarke, explored shifting aspects of identity through the

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medium of cloth. Their parallel staging placed the collectively produced Knitting Map into a relationship with works by a range of named practitioners. These included both the foundational figure of Anni Albers, generally recognised for her role in the reassessment of textiles as an art form from her work at the Bauhaus onwards, in addition to contemporary British artists Grayson Perry and Jeremy Deller and the Irish artist Sarah Browne, whose work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2009.1 Both Deller and Browne’s practice involves an engagement with community similar to that embodied in The Knitting Map, reinforcing a degree of synergy between both exhibitions, and in a joint review of the two shows Pamela Hardesty pointed towards their significance in securing a role for ‘textile’ in contemporary Irish art practice. Yet, as her review concluded, this use of an expanded medium is situated within the wider context of political, social and cultural transformation within Ireland, offering a ‘new communication through cloth [that] can only develop and deepen over time, as Ireland accesses sensitive languages to help articulate its ongoing change’ (Hardesty 2015: 299). In 2015, The Knitting Map in The Glucksman was on very different territory from its initial display as a completed project in the civic space of Cork City Hall, a transition that in turn contributes to the significant range of meanings that the work has engendered. These were already in production well before the Map itself was completed. For Jools Gilson, the originator and one of the directors of the project, an important aspect was the generation of a sense of community, an aim borne out by the testimonies of many participants over the duration of the project, while drawing on a long history of knitting as associated with the city of Cork itself. In the end, over two thousand knitters were involved in the production of the Map, many of them women from working-class communities within Cork city. The initially positive media response within Ireland soon began to include elements of fierce criticism, although this also needs to be seen in the context of a wider questioning of the achievements of the Year of Culture as a whole; by May 2005, the ongoing project was being referred to by one writer as a ‘much-resented rug’ (Lynch 2005: 26). This was partly due to speculation around the undisclosed cost (one of the conditions of its funding was that this remain hidden until the project was completed) and also due to misunderstandings about the nature of the finished product – the expectation that it would result in a literal mapping of the city. The subsequent reemergence of The Knitting Map as a textile installation a decade later, within the spaces of an art gallery, in addition to the resonant associations of the photographs taken of it, opens up increased layers of significance. Its presence within the art institution suggests a further legibility within related discourses around both contemporary art practice and art history; cocuration at The Glucksman with an exhibition including both the historical antecedent embodied in Albers’ work in addition to a range of contemporary practitioners only serves to reinforce this. The main focus of this essay will be the tracing of The Knitting Map’s relationship with its predecessors, particularly within the field of art practice within Ireland, a process of inquiry that in turn may throw up some surprising comparisons. Yet it is useful, also, to be aware that these encounters with the past are in turn mediated through the concerns of the present.

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The entangled map and art history In this photograph of The Knitting Map installed in the gallery, the flow of textile creates an envisioned space where inner and outer conjoin and touch. In a similar manner, I want to suggest the possibility of an imaginative encounter that shifts the register of engagement from the spatial to the temporal – an enmeshing of both past and present as a means of informing a reading of the work. In doing so, I want to focus on the sense of movement suggested by the photographic staging of The Knitting Map both here and in other images of the installation by Tyner that appear to activate the space of the gallery as the fabric pools across its floor. This evocation of a continual becoming, of signification that remains enduringly unfinished, is reminiscent of anthropologist Tim Ingold’s proposal of an ‘ontology that assigns primacy to processes of formation as against the final products, and to flows and transformations of materials as against states of matter’ (Ingold 2010: 2–3). In a reading derived initially from Deleuze and Guattari, Ingold seeks to problematise the perceived relationships of things within a worldview that sees their role as primarily to be acted upon, as opposed to having an active role in the generations of meanings themselves. For Ingold, moreover, this relationship is not one that produces clearly defined patterns of influence that link together two finite points, but a more complex engagement in which things have their own agency, a creative entanglement embodied within a ‘meshwork of interwoven lines and movement’ (3). The Knitting Map’s relationships with both preceding and current aspects of art practice, especially in Ireland, are not always straightforward. It is perhaps easiest to situate the work within contemporary categories of installation or participatory artwork, both of which have their own histories, and which in turn inform a reading of this particular piece. Art practice in Ireland has undergone major shifts since the 1980s, Figure 2.2  The Knitting Map at The Glucksman UCC 2015. with the concomitant emergence of a Image courtesy of The Glucksman. Photograph by Tomás Tyner. diversity of forms of writing about the

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contemporary that acknowledges the plurality and sophistication of many of the issues engaged with in current art made in Ireland, its relationships to a wider field of art practice and, more generally, to the world within which it is produced. Positioning the Map in relation to terms on which art history has often relied is more problematic; until recently, Irish art history has been largely reliant on notions of connoisseurship and a sense of a linear, progressive development from one set of formal possibilities to another. Such a view tends to be highly selective, and linked to hegemonic notions of the artistic canon. The situation is beginning to change, but it is hard to see how this vast, provocative installation can become meaningful in relation to these categories. To read The Knitting Map’s positionality as a meshing of both past and present, however, is not to argue for confusion. Rather than seeing these relationships as direct and causal, one of readily identifiable patterns of influence, I am suggesting something closer to Karen Barad’s use of the term ‘diffraction’ to imply a methodology of ‘reading insights through one another in attending to and responding to the details and specificities of relations of difference and how they matter’ (Barad 2007: 71). As Barad also insists (3), material is inseparable from its meaning; significantly, the process of reconfiguring The Knitting Map’s relationships with both past and present art practice is one that takes its cue also from its qualities as a material artefact at all levels. Knitting – as both a social process and a technical means of production – creates an artefact whose material is already part of an expanded range of potentialities within installation art. Yet the meanings of this particular piece also continue to be produced for viewers through processes both of its curation in the gallery and the photographic documentation of this. Rather than closing down on signification through the regulatory mechanisms of linear art histories, this is instead a methodology that opens up a world of possibilities.

Situating the Map in the present: Installation and participation Curated within the gallery, The Knitting Map becomes increasingly legible as installation. As a form that has emerged as the dominant mode of contemporary art practice, installation became particularly prevalent from the 1970s onwards in the light of challenges to the status of both painting and sculpture as practices with a canonical status in earlier histories of modernism. This shift away from hierarchical notions of aesthetic purity has also extended to the materials from which art is made. Rather than painted canvas, marble or steel, installation often uses a range of different materials that include digital media, found objects – and also textiles. It additionally involves a breakdown of earlier categories of both production and display; works of this kind are often site-specific, with the result that the conditions within which viewers encounter the work and the nature of their engagement are also highly contingent. This is also dependent on the work’s interaction with the space that surrounds it, which means that curatorial decisions also become highly significant in determining the meanings of installation. Entering into the space of the

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gallery, viewers are engaged, to use Claire Bishop’s term, in ‘a singular totality’ (Bishop 2005: 6), an embodied experience that often involves sensory awareness beyond the visual. This would appear to be the case in The Knitting Map’s highly performative staging at its exhibition in 2015. Bridging the differing spatial orientations of wall and floor, this type of installation also determines how spectators negotiate the space of the gallery, circumnavigating the edges of the work itself. Yet these changes to the status of the artwork embodied in installation have also enabled a mediated engagement with rapidly shifting social and political conditions through forms of creaFigure 2.3  Beverly Semmes, Big Silver, 1996. Silver lame, electric motor, pulleys. tive practice. Textile-based Unframed, dimensions variable. Collection IMMA, Dublin. Beverly Semmes. installations by women artists have provided a means of critiquing the construction of gender through a rupture of the hegemonic boundaries of art and craft, whereby craft is seen as ‘women’s work’ and hence not art. A significant aspect of Ann Hamilton’s piece mneme installed at Tate Liverpool in 1994–1996, for example, involved a room filled with long curtain-like sheets through which the viewer had to negotiate a path, blurring the distinction between the domestic and the theatrical. Other uses of textile as a medium can involve the deconstruction of narcissism as a component of feminine identity by means of its staging as spectacle, as in the conceptual clothing of artists such as Beverly Semmes. Indeed, the rippling surfaces of Semmes’ oversized and elongated dresses spreading across the floor during her exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 1996 are uncannily evoked by the curatorial decisions at work in the staging of The Knitting Map some years later at The Glucksman. As Declan Long asserts, installation in Ireland became particularly appropriate for artists in a society ‘that was not only undergoing accelerated “modernising” transformations, but that remained enduringly unsettled by traumatic post-colonial legacies and contained by the forces of church-led patriarchy’ (Long 2014: 229). One example of this – that also happens to be fibre-based – can be found in the ‘rope drawings’ of

Chapter 2  The entangled map and Irish art    23

Patrick Ireland (Brian O’Doherty). Beginning in 1973 and installed in gallery spaces in the United States, Ireland and across Europe, these evolved within a broader context of contemporary art debates around relationships between architectural space, industrial materials and machine processes. The ‘rope drawings’ were predominantly concerned with challenges to the role of the spectator through a combination of painted wall surface and the stringing of nylon cords across the gallery. These in turn Figure 2.4  Patrick Ireland, H-Block rope drawconfigured the movements of viewers around and through ing no. 92, 1989. Orpheus Gallery Belfast, Liam Kelly. the space. In 1989, however, Ireland’s interest in different forms of architectural space became explicitly politicised with his H-Block rope drawing installed at the Orpheus Gallery in Belfast. Its title was a direct reference to the ‘architecture of containment’ (Purbrick 2004) of Long Kesh/Maze Prison, which at that time still held numerous republicans and loyalists convicted of offences during Northern Ireland’s ongoing political conflict. The 1980s, the period during which installation began to feature increasingly in both Irish gallery spaces and art schools, was also the point at which the politics of the Irish body became inescapable. These included both the 1980–1981 hunger strike in Long Kesh/Maze Prison and the preceding ‘no wash’ protest, whose excremental smears on cell walls were evoked in Patrick Ireland’s later installation. This was, however, also a time when both Irish feminism and an emergent feminist art practice began to respond to the restrictive legislation around abortion and female sexuality that was backed by the repressive power of the Catholic church. This is an area to which this discussion will return in more detail in tracing The Knitting Map’s antecedents. One of the most

Figure 2.5  Dorothy Cross, Ebb, 1998, installed at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin. Image courtesy of the artist.

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important examples of installation in 1980s Irish context, however, was Dorothy Cross’ Ebb (1988) at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, and in which a range of sculptural forms combined to suggest the deconstruction of gender polarities (Fowler 1990: 59). As Pamela Hardesty indicated in her exhibition review, in the early twenty-first century the expanded field of practice in Irish art still maintains political relevance. The understanding of The Knitting Map’s significance in relation to the wider political conditions surrounding both its production and its display cannot be underplayed. In the context of continuing campaigns around abortion2 and the revelations about the lives of women and children destroyed by the church-run Magdalene Laundries, feminism in Ireland remains far from a finished project. Also related to the expanded possibilities of installation-based work, the development of collaborative and participatory art practices provide a further contemporary context for The Knitting Map. The emphasis in both of these is on art as a social process that breaks down the distinctions between art as a specialised activity and everyday life, blurring the boundaries also between artist and audience through shared experience and prioritising the shared process of making over the finished product. Although there are earlier antecedents, for example in Allan Kaprow’s Happenings in the early 1960s, participatory and collaborative artworks came to the fore from the mid-1990s onwards, initially in the context of Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aethetics (Bourriaud 1998). Rather than any concern with more traditional forms of object-based artmaking with an emphasis on the work’s visual qualities, this is a form of practice that takes as its basis the social relations between people, with the aim of ‘the invention of models of sociability’ and ‘conviviality’ (6–7). In many instances, however, as advocated by the writer Grant Kester and others (Kester 2004), these projects necessitate a consideration of the ethical issues around the role of socially and politically marginalised groups in participatory artworks. In the filmed documentation of Francis Alÿs’ When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), a project commissioned for the Lima Biennale, for example, five hundred volunteer students with shovels worked together for a day to move a large sand dune by a few inches. Many of these students spoke in the film about their positive experience of participation. The futility of their labour, however, was intended by Alÿs as an allegory for the lack of political change in South America. Yet what the film also omitted were any views from the large shantytown at the foot of the sand dune; those with the most to gain from radical change to the Peruvian political system therefore played no part in the project. This is not to suggest in any way that Alÿs’ project was deliberately exploitative, but it does highlight the issue around the potential ethical concerns of participatory art practices. The Knitting Map’s participants were mainly (although certainly not exclusively) working-class women from Cork, whose popular perception as marginalised and disenfranchised is clearly signified in an anonymous businessman’s contemptuous reference to them as ‘a pack of oul’ biddies knitting’ (Lynch 2005: 26). However, they were not an anonymous group: named, individual women appeared in the media coverage giving their own accounts of the process (Roederer 2005: 10–11). In addition to giving a new value to an activity that for many women was part of their expected domestic roles, these women also

Chapter 2  The entangled map and Irish art    25

stressed both the conviviality and sense of community of the knitting sessions in St Luke’s Church; for example, one of the knitters, Maura O’Connell, emphasised both the ‘companionship and friendship’ involved, plus an awareness ‘that you’re part of something huge, something the whole world knows about’ (O’Connell in Kerrigan 2005: 8). A further interpretaFigure 2.6  Regulars at The Knitting Map sitting in the wooden amphitheatre that tion of the significance of housed the work. St Luke’s Church, Cork, Ireland, 2005. half/angel. participatory art practice is in Claire Bishop’s stressing of its relationships to its avant-garde antecedents within early twentieth century European modernism, and the confrontational strategies of Dada and Futurism in particular (Bishop 2012). There are a couple of important provisos here in that the artistic avant-garde in Ireland never displayed the same alliance of radical forms of representation allied to revolution that it did in Europe in the early twentieth century. Within its very different social and cultural conditions, the focus of art practice was still around painting as a site of innovation, rather than participatory practices. However, within the unsettled politics of newly independent Ireland, radical art was still considered to be disruptive – especially if made by women. This is apparent from the reaction to Mainie Jellett’s first exhibition of her disturbingly beautiful abstract paintings in Dublin in 1923, described by George Russell in his Irish Statesman review as an example of ‘artistic malaria’ and as ‘sub-human’ (Arnold 1991: 80). As an innovative work that managed to confound viewers’ expectations, The Knitting Map is in honourable company with regard to its art-historical precedents.

Place, knitting and female embodiment in the histories of Irish art Cascading, volupting across the gallery floor, one of the issues with The Knitting Map, it seems, was its inability to lie quietly, to acquiesce in a seamless stitching into historical categories of Irish art. This is partly where the trouble starts, and this too is where my attempt at a new negotiation of the Map’s relationship with existing categories of art history – and the assumptions and values that underpin them – once more begins. As Edward Casey points out, both mapping and landscape painting engage with geographical

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terrain in different ways. As he also suggests, they are complementary activities that open up an active relationship with what they represent. Maps, according to Casey, ‘facilitate our access to the life-world of action (by literally guiding this action) whereas landscape paintings aid in contemplating the surrounding world’ (Casey 2002: xiv). This relationship is experienced through embodied engagement in that ‘paintings call mainly upon darting eye movements and slight shifts of stance – if only on the part of the viewer’s imaginative body – in contradistinction to maps, which project and often induce the use of the viewer’s actual body.’ Significantly, the processes of embodied engagement with a given location also had a very specific role to play in the development of The Knitting Map. One source for this was in Gilson’s practice as a dancer and performance artist, the individual movement of the performer’s body being extrapolated into a complex choreography that brought together a collective process of knitting with the mass movement of bodies across the city. This was achieved through a combination of very different processes; not only the manual work of knitting, but the use of CCTV cameras to capture the degree of movement throughout the city centre and the various technologies involved in meteorological collection. The data produced was then run through a software programme to produce a template for the knitter: the degree of movement or ‘busyness’ denoted by a specific knitting stitch to be worked within one of a range of colours indicating the weather conditions at that time (Barkun and Gilson-Ellis 2007). Although its appearance results partly from the interpretation of changing meteorological conditions over the city of Cork, the Map evokes associations of the rural rather than the urban: executed in the shades of the natural world, the muted greens and purples of landscape interspersed with the blues and whites of a foaming sea. Its shifting topography derives from localised variations in texture across the many panels, the outcome not only of the use of different stitches and techniques denoted by digitally generated patterns that changed daily, but the interpretation of these through the handiwork of each individual knitter. Yet this tonal range does not just have the phenomenological associations of an engagement with the shifting material conditions of contemporary Cork – it is also one with a particular significance in the development of Irish art itself. There are several instances of The Knitting Map’s tangential engagement with earlier histories of Irish art that we could usefully unpick. These in turn inform how we might read both the finished appearance of the piece as a tonal landscape and also the gendered associations of knitting as the means of the work’s production. As in other decolonising countries, in early twentieth century Ireland the visual representation of landscape was closely bound up with the cultural formation of a new national identity. The West of Ireland, already laden with the cultural associations of the Celtic Revival, became the explicit focus of the work of painters such as Paul and Grace Henry and Charles Lamb. Paul Henry in particular developed a style of painting in which features of rugged landscape and the life of western subsistence farming and fishing communities were depicted in a stylised and ultimately reductive formal vocabulary accompanied by a distinctive tonal range. The sheer number of his paintings of the West of Ireland landscapes and their still-enduring popularity has meant that they have become a template for representations

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of rural timelessness. Despite this, however, they also have a particularly forceful historical contingency. After Ireland’s independence in 1922, Henry’s iconography of the West and its depiction through a muted palette became increasingly identified with de Valera’s utopian vision for the identity of an independent Ireland as a predominantly rural, Irish-speaking, Catholic nation. Yet it was not just Henry’s subject matter but the tonality of his paintings – the soft gradations within the range of colours – that also thereby implicitly became identified with the construction of national identity through an idealised archaism. Although produced within an expanded field of art practice in 2005, and within very different political and cultural conditions, both the tonal range of The Knitting Map and its evocation of landscape, perhaps perversely, call some aspects of Henry’s practice to mind. I would suggest that it is precisely these historical associations – and The Knitting Map’s nuanced engagement with them – that contribute significantly to its complexity of meaning as a contemporary artwork. An integral part of Henry’s depictions was also the meticulous observation of the meteorological features and their effect on the perception of landscape. In A Connemara Village (c. 1924–36), a painting typical of the artist’s

Figure 2.7  Paul Henry, A Connemara Village, c. 1934–1936. Oil on board, 35 x 40 cm. Copyright DACS 2017. Image Courtesy of Adam’s Auctioneers, Dublin.

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concerns throughout his career, the cumulus clouds hovering over a purplish mountain are reflected in the still water to the foreground. In The Knitting Map, by comparison, shifting meteorological conditions are allied to the experience of urban contemporaneity. In Henry’s work their ephemerality in conjunction with other features of the rural setting such as the cluster of thatched whitewashed cottages suggests the continuity of ­premodern notions of time and a preindustrial way of life. In suggesting a comparison across time between The Knitting Map and Paul Henry’s paintings, I am not proposing in any sense a reduction of the later work to the programmatic associations of Irish ethnicity that have become an integral part of the associations of his landscape images. However, what is significant is that this historically identified tonal range, combined with meteorological investigation (although used to very different effect), had roles to play as defining features of a work that, in 2005, could be seen as signifying very different formations of national identity. Produced in the context of Cork’s role as the European Capital of Culture, The Knitting Map also had a job to do as articulating more complex notions of Irishness within a federalist European context, as opposed to the isolationism of the Free State era when Henry’s work was produced. A feature of EU cultural policy since 1985, the annual designation of a City of Culture encourages citizens ‘to take part in the year-long activities and play a bigger role in their city’s development and cultural expression’ (European Commission: 1) – just as it also mobilises practices of creativity within an economic agenda, in its links to regeneration. And despite the assertions that this is part of a ‘universal language of creativity’ in practice the promotion of cities of culture relies on the historical associations of specific localised features. In this instance, these involve the historically interconnected codes of representation of an Irish landscape, and knitting as identified with engendered Irishness. The landscape of the West in Irish visual representation is fundamentally bound up with notions of ethnicity and gender that played such a significant role in the formation of Ireland’s national identity. During the 1930s, however, Ireland’s agricultural economy was in crisis, especially in the West where the steady stream of emigration seemed almost the only solution. In this situation, the continuity of rural life depended heavily on the hidden labour of women, both within the home and as agricultural workers (Barber 2013: 73). One of these areas of women’s work was the knitting of Aran sweaters; the constructed mythology that surrounds this artefact has also played a significant role within the formations of Irishness. Their origins apparently untraceable historically, the distinctive Aran patterns with their ornate stitchwork were attributed to the wives and daughters of fishermen in the Aran Islands (off the coast of Galway) knitting jumpers for their menfolk to wear on their dangerous sea journeys. The individual patterning of the jumper was believed to play an important role in identifying the bodies of the drowned, while the particular form of the stitches used has been linked to early Christian and pre-Christian symbolism. Contrary to this ahistorical account of the origins of Aran knitting, this type of sweater first appeared as a cultural artefact in the 1930s (Starmore 1997), although its degree of visibility at the time was still inconsistent. A simplified version accompanied by footage of women knitting featured in Robert Flaherty’s film Man of Aran (1934), yet there is no sign of an Aran sweater in the equally ethnographic paintings of West of Ireland

Chapter 2  The entangled map and Irish art    29

Figure 2.8  Gerard Dillon, The Dreamer, c. 1946. Oil on board, 24 × 48 cm. Copyright Patrick Dillon. Image courtesy of Adam’s Auctioneers, Dublin.

fishermen by Seán Keating from the same period. Indeed, it was only in the 1940s that jumper-clad fishermen began to be a regular feature in depictions of men from the region in the work of both Basil Rákoczi and Gerard Dillon. The Aran sweater’s beginnings during the Free State years, however, meant that it came into being at the same time that the visual representation of the West of Ireland was also playing a significant role in nation-building; similar to Henry or Keating’s paintings, its popularity among Irish Americans was indicative of the sweater’s role in fuelling diasporic nostalgia (Carden 2014). And it is with the Aran sweater that we return once more to embodied processes of artmaking and The Knitting Map’s entanglements with the past. In Pauline Cummins’ Inis t’Oirr: Aran Dance (1985), location, textiles, the male body and the female gaze are all brought together in a relationship that radically problematises deeply embedded formations of rurality and gender that have held so much power within the discourse of nation in Ireland. As a tape-slide piece, this was an example of the type of installation-based artwork that increasingly challenged the dominance of traditional modes of practice, such as sculpture and painting, in the 1980s, while also providing a means for more politically radical or subversive voices to be heard. Cummins’ time-based work addressed these interconnected themes through a series of shifting images focused around the photographed male nude, accompanied by a soundtrack that combined description of the process of knitting an Aran jumper with the haptic evocation of the

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male body’s response in a sequence of desirous touch, sexual arousal and eventual detumescence. The relationship between the knitter, the garment she makes and the body it clothes are inseparable in this work, as is clear from the artist’s description of the chance encounter where it began: My interest was aroused by an old Aran sweater I saw, on a tailor’s dummy. It clung so tightly, it was like no Aran sweater I’d seen before. It was sensuous and strong. It was voluptuous and warm, gentle and soft. It was very male. It was made by a woman for a man – it was sexual. (Cummins in Nash 1996: 162) In its equation of knitting with drawing, Cummins’ Inis t’Oirr elides the genderbased hierarchical divisions between art and craft, claiming both for a continuum of female creative practice. This is a feature of the soundtrack’s opening words: ‘In a sense knitting is like drawing with a long piece of wool, its finger weaving . . .’ and later as a significant visual component in the hand-drawn patterns of the jumper’s design superimposed on the photographed torso. At a time when female sexuality was the subject of significant political contention in Ireland, with the recent death of Ann Lovett and the Kerry Babies scandal,3 the radicalism of Cummins’ project lies in its insistent articulation – both through the visual and aural elements – of a female engagement with the male body that not only fulfils the traditional role of nurturing but is also actively desiring, even though, as Catherine Nash has pointed out, it only achieves this through a potentially problematic objectification of the male body by the female gaze (164). Significantly, it is the act of knitting itself that also works to undo the sexually conservative identifications of the Aran Islands as part of their role within the Irish cultural imaginary. Cummins’ work could be seen as prefigured in this respect by another radical refiguring of the West, this time as a site of queer subjectivity, in Gerard Dillon’s earlier – and necessarily somewhat encoded – desiring gaze towards the reclining Aran-clad body of the young island fisherman. However, in relation to The Knitting Map itself, both of these are instances when wool becomes reconFigure 2.9  Pauline Cummins, Inis t’Oirr, 1985. Collection IMMA, Dublin. figured in an identification of a radically

Chapter 2  The entangled map and Irish art    31

subversive sensuality. The qualities of the installation’s materials, informed in turn by a reading of the past and worked in the colours of the landscapes of national identity, now begin to offer the possibility of a sensuous and subversive unravelling of the authority invested in these earlier representations.

Conclusion I began this process of reading The Knitting Map by considering how the space it encountered interacted with the work’s materiality in its production of meaning. This has been mainly focused around the curatorial space of the art gallery that in turn has led to an opening up of an engagement with discourses around contemporary art practice and art history. Entangled with the installation’s encounter with the gallery, however, is an awareness of how the meanings of the piece have also been configured within other spaces. These include the signification of bonds of community within the participatory knitting sessions over the course of a year at St Luke’s Hall, or its embodiment of civic values as an important mark of Cork’s year as City of Culture signified in its later display at the Millennium Hall. All of these moments, in turn, contribute to the development of The Knitting Map’s own narrative. Yet this is given further cogency by an active engagement with earlier moments of Irish art – the colour codings of landscape as national identity, or the feminist revelation of knitting as a practice embodying an active, desiring female agency. All of these factors are woven into The Knitting Map, enriching and compounding its levels of meaning. Yet when I return again to the photograph of its installation at The Glucksman, its textured tonal folds sensuously nuzzling the window, it is clear that this is a work that will never quite be contained.

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3

The Knitting Map and the media Rachel Andrews

“N

ewspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation” wrote George Bernard Shaw in the preface to Too True to Be Good (2003), one of his later, more despairing pieces of work. Those involved in The Knitting Map, a large-scale community art project and flagship commission for Cork’s tenure as European Capital of Culture in 2005, must have often thought the same. Over the course of a year, the project became a symbol of all that was perceived to have gone wrong with the cultural year in Cork, and it received significant negative media coverage, both locally and nationally. The negative coverage continued into 2006 and has raised its head, periodically, since then. The criticism, and the depiction of the project as controversial, was unanticipated, as Deborah Barkun and Jools Gilson have pointed out: “The Knitting Map was clearly not the site of conventional controversy; directors had not misappropriated its public funding and the project contained no provocative imagery or language” (Barkun and Gilson 2010: 6). Nonetheless, from an early stage, the project was in the public eye. It was one of the first projects contracted by the executive of the European Capital of Culture for 2005, announced in late July 2003 as one of eight flagship commissions. At that stage, it was promoted ambitiously as a knitted map of Cork, based on a pattern generated from satellite photography of the city. The map will be drawn on a vast scale, involving 50 people at a 33

time knitting every day for a year. The knitters will be drawn from the community, and the project may involve a total of 5000 participants. The knitted map is likely to tour internationally and will be the biggest installation of its kind in the world. (Cork 2005 Press Release, 2003) Later, because of the need to recruit knitters, project organisers half/angel staged a series of knit-ins in advance of the cultural year, interventions that were covered by the mainstream press, often in a light-hearted manner, such as the Irish Examiner’s report on a knit-in organised at Fota House in Cork: “Knitting is the new sex, declared Charlotte in Sex and the City” (Sheridan 2004). This appeared to set the tone for much of the earlier coverage of the project, which, while being a complicated work, nonetheless lent itself to the use of clichéd language and puns. The early flippancy of tone, I suggest, also made it easier to deride the project later on, in that it was rarely reported on using the language and terminology associated with a serious piece of contemporary art. In 2006, while reporting on a public discussion of The Knitting Map, the Irish Examiner reminded us that “the controversial Knitting Map became a symbol of Cork 2005’s perceived failure. By its unusual nature, it became a caricature for a grateful media to lampoon; and, in the climate of recrimination, which ran through the year, it was an easy target” (O’Riordan 2006: 13). In an article for Paper Visual Art Journal, the critic and curator Sarah Kelleher suggested something similar, writing that the project was “woefully, albeit gleefully misinterpreted by the media” (Kelleher 2015). Meanwhile, in a paper written following the project’s exhibition in Pennsylvania in 2007, US academic Deborah Barkun stated that “[i]nstead of engaging with what the technology did to knitting, the press focused almost entirely on the Knitting Map’s level of funding, and within Ireland, the work became the site of major controversy” (Barkun and Gilson 2010: 6). In this chapter I want to consider the various ways in which the media operates, in particular, the newspaper media, as part of an attempt to contextualise the journalistic coverage of The Knitting Map. Beginning with Shaw’s still-relevant quote, I suggest that news journalism thrives on exaggeration and drama, whether that drama be a bicycle accident or indeed the collapse of civilisation, and that once a subject has proved itself worthy of such dramatic coverage, it is extremely hard to insert nuance into the discussion. This is often not helped by tight deadlines, along with non-expert knowledge of the subject to hand and a mainstream Irish media culture that remains – despite significant changes in recent years – white, male, heterosexual and conservative, which influences how certain topics are covered and why. Nonetheless, I would also like to counter arguments that appear to view the media as a homogenous entity, capable of constructing a single, set agenda. Despite its overarching culture, the media is an assemblage, and while there was indeed negative coverage of The Knitting Map, which shaped perhaps a dominant narrative of the project, it was by no means the only manner in which it was reported on during 2005. These contradictions are important to explore, as they remind us of the difficulty of drawing firm conclusions around how and why media controversy manifests in any given situation. Although The Knitting Map has subsequently been described as a “lightning rod” for those dissatisfied with the planning and programming of Cork 2005 (Kelleher 2015), Textiles, Community and Controversy    34

it was not immediately obvious that it would become, in the eyes of some critics, Cork’s most prominent “folly” (Hannigan 2013).1 The Map is not mentioned by the Irish Times, nor by RTÉ, as part of their reporting on the culture year’s programme launch in October 2004, while later coverage, in January 2005, takes a mild tone – it is light, descriptive, curious and, at times, ever so slightly bemused: “What sort of project gets knitters, techies, bikers and dancers working together. It could happen only in the cultural capital” (Pocock 2005: 8). Meanwhile, the Evening Echo told readers to expect “[k]nitting like it has never been seen before, that’s what’s promised by a major Cork 2005 project” (Connolly 2005: 6). For the Irish Times, reporter Iva Pocock interviewed Kate O’Brien, project manager for The Knitting Map, paraphrasing her explanation that the project was not a “literal map . . . but a map which reflects life in Cork during 2005” (Pocock 2005: 8). O’Brien is also quoted in the Evening Echo, telling the paper that The weather on the day will translate into the colour of the wool chosen by the knitters, the day’s traffic will be reflected in the horizontal and vertical stitches and the raised Aran designs will reflect the volume and movement of people on the streets of Cork. (Connolly 2005: 6) These early articles suggest an attempt by journalists to engage with the complexity of the Map. Neither report is specialist – the Irish Times Magazine is a lifestyle publication, and the Echo ran its piece on a general news page – but both make an effort to explain the technology. Despite this, during a 2015 symposium in Cork to mark the tenth anniversary of the Map, keynote speaker Dr Jo Turney professed herself shocked by the coverage of The Knitting Map in the Irish media. The symposium in question had been organised by Gilson to coincide with a ten-year anniversary exhibition of the Map at The Glucksman at University College Cork, and brought together art critics and commentators to discuss a decade of The Knitting Map: its making, reception and future. Before continuing, it is worth attempting to offer some context. When Cork was awarded the designation of European Capital of Culture in 2002, it became the smallest European city to receive the award, with a city population of 127,000 and a hinterland of 250,000 (Quinn and O’Halloran 2006: 11). The designation “unleashed a swell of local pride, a great sense of joy, a desire for civic involvement and participation, and a general sense of ‘working together for the “betterment” of Cork’” (Quinn and O’Halloran 2006:11). Joy, however, was supplanted by disappointment, even bitterness. Director of the IndieCork Film Festival, Mick Hannigan, notes that “[i]t quickly became apparent that these expectations weren’t going to be realised through the 2005 office” (Hannigan 2016),2 and as early as December 2004, the Where’s Me Culture? fringe group was created, of which Hannigan, who was then director of the Cork Film Festival, was a founding member. Such difficulties are not unique to the Cork experience, but it did mean the year and its organisation received significant negative media coverage, locally and nationally. The Irish Times Weekend Review ran a profile piece with a headline that read “Cork: The 2005 European capital of culture that brought us Roy Keane, Sonia Chapter 3  The Knitting Map and the media    35

Figure 3.1  Roy Keane and Sonia O’Sullivan illustration by Peter Hanan in ‘The People’s Republic’ by Frank McNally, The Irish Times ­Weekend Review, p. 5, June 11, 2005.

O’Sullivan and blaming Dublin” (McNally 2005: 5),3 while a Sunday Independent feature article chose the simple yet devastating headline, “Sunk” (Lynch 2005: 25). Meanwhile, contributors to a local chatroom asked, “Is this still going on?” (People’s Republic of Cork chatroom, 26 August 2005). In retrospect, perhaps this was a difficulty of anticipation, with expectations “so high that they were unlikely ever to have been fully achieved” (Quinn and O’Halloran 2006: 12), but it doesn’t mean the disappointment at the time was not felt viscerally. In 2005, I was based in Dublin, where I worked for the now defunct Sunday Tribune. I covered the arts for the newspaper – mostly theatre – but because it was a small operation I also worked across news, news analysis and opinion. I had also begun to cover culture for the Artzone programme on RTE Lyric FM, Ireland’s classical music radio station, and I wrote sporadically about culture and the arts for other journalistic outlets, such as Magill magazine. I didn’t report on The Knitting Map, nor did I see the coverage of it at Textiles, Community and Controversy    36

the time, although I remember some anecdotal comment swirling about during my visits to Cork, which left me, largely, with a negative impression of the project. At the 2015 symposium, Sarah Foster, a lecturer at the Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork, who had looked at the media coverage of the Map, said that when it comes to the media, when it comes to newspapers, yes it does seem to be fairly simplistic, and yes it does seem to trade in cliché, and yes it does seem to deal with a very simplistic view of what knitting is, or what craft is, or what women’s work is . . . if a discourse is set up by the media in relation to knitting not being worthy of any money, let alone an unnamed hundreds of thousands and if a discourse is set up around Cork 2005 being a shambles and this is a symbol of that shambles, then that will be perpetuated, it seems to me. (Foster 2015) I take many of Foster’s points. My experience of journalism is that it is hard and fast, working to tight, immoveable deadlines. When I worked at the Tribune, I rarely had the time to put together more than one draft of a piece of writing; these conditions often – although not inevitably – lead to the simplicity of discourse to which Foster refers. News journalism is driven by conflict, and various kinds of conflict will be considered worthy of public interest – in this instance, the divide that was felt between a citizenry and the 2005 festival organisers, with The Knitting Map publicly identified by critics as an expensive symbol of the mismanagement of a community’s expectations. Less clear is the manner in which such a discourse is set up. There are times when it is largely media-driven, such as the response to writer Sebastian Barry’s 2002 play Hinterland (Barnes 2008:176)4; more often, the press reacts to an issue that has been raised and reports on it, ideally in a balanced, ethical way, but conflict will always push the story forward. Journalists often (and often justifiably) use a ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ defence of their work; however, curatorial decisions, conscious or otherwise, are almost always at play and influence what stories are told, by whom and why. Despite this, because the media, although a singular noun, constitutes a myriad of different parts, any discussion about media coverage is still difficult to generalise upon. In 2006, an obviously hurt Richard Povall, of half/angel, was quoted as being suspicious of “condescension on the media’s part, given it was a community project involving something as unfashionable as knitting” (O’Riordan 2006: 13), while Jools Gilson-Ellis,5 also of half/angel, suggested that the project had been “a difficult one to explain”, stating that “[p]eople were left expecting a literal map” (O’Riordan 2006: 13). O’Riordan also reports Gilson-Ellis saying that Cork 2005 had handled the publicity for The Knitting Map clumsily. But at the 2015 symposium, Gilson also acknowledged there had been much positive coverage of the project, something she said had been highlighted by a PhD student who had considered the reporting of the work at her request: I’m a bit too close to it and inevitably when it’s your work it’s hurtful, and you remember the things that were very hurtful and were strident and you can’t see the whole thing, and he sat there and he read it all and he said ‘you know there’s a lot of positive stuff here.’ (Gilson 2015) Chapter 3  The Knitting Map and the media    37

A significant amount of the positive coverage of The Knitting Map tended to focus on the work as a community project. For example, in June 2005, social diarist Gerry McLoughlin detailed her participation in a ‘celebrity knit-in’ (McLoughlin 2005: 34–5), while the Irish Examiner interviewed one of the knitters for its ‘Busy Today’ column (Kerrigan 2005: 8). There were other articles, however, which tried to get to grips with the thought processes behind the work. In July 2005, the Evening Echo ran a substantive piece by reporter Thomas Roederer on the project, with the article’s standfirst6 calling the Map “one of the most successful City of Culture events” (Roederer 2005). In the piece, Roederer paid attention to both the concept behind the Map and the process of its creation: “[t]he map, created by a combination of technology, community spirit, and the classical art of knitting, is a constant flow of different colours and knitting structures depicting the constantly changing weather and activity throughout the city” (2005). He also explained in some detail the technology involved in the Map’s creation, as well as its impact upon the knitting: The project makes use of motion-sensing technology and complex networks to give the knitters live, on-screen displays of the structures and colours they have to use. The pattern that appears on the screens is based on calculations of information that comes from four CCTV cameras in the city, a satellite, and weather-measuring equipment. (Roederer 2005) He also tried to offer some context for the work, noting that “half/angel has used motion sensors before on a smaller scale for dancing performances” (2005). The reporter also interviewed Gilson-Ellis, giving her an opportunity to explain the project in more detail: “This technology allows the dancer to play an instrument while dancing, says Gilson-Ellis” (2005), and to try to explain the importance of the process, as opposed to the result. Roederer quotes Gilson stating that “the poetic aspect of knitting is what counts”, and he says she explained to him that knitting has always been alive in Cork, and it can be an excellent community activity. He also quotes her stating that “the knitters are not here to make something, they come to enjoy the atmosphere while doing something they enjoy” (2005). Earlier in the year, the Sunday Tribune had also reported on the Map, prompted by the notion that the project looked set to become the biggest hand-knit creation in the world, giving consideration to the technology in reasonable detail: Four CCTV cameras have been set up around the city, tracking the flow of people and cars, and sending the information to a main computer; which is also receiving data from the weather station. This information is then converted into prearranged knitting patterns, which are sent to 25 knitting stations. There, the people with the needles knit the pattern into the map. (McInerney, 2005) However, the article also largely framed The Knitting Map as part of a “current knitting craze”, stating that “[t]he craft is currently enjoying a world-wide revival, and is the newest fad among celebrities” (McInerney 2005). One might contest that words such as ‘fad’ and ‘craze’ are not terms usually associated with a thoughtful work of art

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and suggest that, despite the overall positive nature of this article, their use gives weight to the contention that the media’s reporting of the Map tended towards the simplistic or the trivial. Much more overtly derisive was the report, in May 2005, by the Dublin-based Sunday Independent, which published a long magazine article on Cork’s tenure as European Capital of Culture. Five months into the festival, it set out to test some of the public criticisms

Figure 3.2  ‘Knit one, purl fun!’ Simply Knitting, p. 98, July 2005. Courtesy of Simply Knitting, Copyright Immediate Media Company.

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of the Cork 2005 programme, with journalist Donal Lynch travelling from Dublin to Cork for the report. Overall, the piece suggests the year thus far had been a failure, with the standfirst reading “[n]early halfway through Cork’s disastrous year as City of Culture locals are growing increasingly frustrated that nothing seems to be happening” (Lynch 2005: 25). Almost all of those quoted in the article indicate anger, frustration or disappointment – or, from the Cork 2005 office, defensiveness: “What is it about you people always focusing on the negative?” (Kennedy, quoted in Lynch 2005: 26). The apparent lack of activity leads Lynch to consider only one 2005 project, The Knitting Map, in any detail. The writer visits the piece in its St Luke’s home, prompted, at least in part, by the “scorn” he says almost all his ­interviewees – all men, save for a phone conversation with Aoife Carlin from the Cork 2005 press office – have poured on the project. Lynch quotes Mick Hannigan describing the project as “daft” (2005: 26). He also quotes an unnamed local businessman, who states that “[w]e want the All Ireland final in Cork, not a pack of oul’ biddies knitting” (2005: 26). Lynch’s article says nothing about the technology, or the concept, behind The Knitting Map, nor does he interview anyone involved in the project. When the reporter does go to view the “much-resented rug” (2005: 26), he writes that he finds it “underwhelming, despite its size”, although he does manage to pay some attention to the creative process behind the project: “Even on a quiet weekday afternoon, there are a couple of women working at it and local schoolkids coming for a look – on their own time” (2005: 26). The writer probes Mick Hannigan, asking “[i]s this not precisely the kind of inclusive event that critics like those in Where’s Me Culture? have been calling for?” Hannigan responds that he is sure the project is “valid in its own way, but perhaps it shouldn’t be one of the main events” (Hannigan, quoted in Lynch 2005: 26). The Sunday Independent article was, undoubtedly, not a pleasant read for those involved in The Knitting Map. Although Lynch does, to some extent, push back against the disparagement of the project, the fact that he doesn’t go into any explanatory detail or talk to anyone involved in The Knitting Map means that the overall impression a reader is left with is of a project that is costly, overfunded and invalid as a City of Culture flagship project. The caption alongside a photograph of one of the knitters describes it as “the controversial Knitting Map”, which has been “greeted with almost universal disdain” (Lynch 2005: 26), while Lynch also raises the issue of the project’s costs, writing that it is “reputed to have received €400,000 in funding” (Lynch 2005: 26). Was the money the primary reason for the finger-pointing? Much focus was indeed placed on the amount of financing The Knitting Map received, and this was aired by the media. The issue was doubtless exacerbated by the fact that half/angel was instructed by its funders not to reveal the costs of the piece: “[w]e now know that the company that won the bid, The Knitting Map, were instructed not to reveal the level of funding, so when something like that happens it inevitably gives rise to speculation” (Hannigan 2016).7 In March 2005, the now defunct local free-sheet Inside Cork told its readers that a “confidential source” had revealed to the newspaper that the project had been allocated over €300,000 from Cork 2005 (Mythen 2005). Journalist Katie Mythen also wrote that both the Cork 2005 office and half/angel were “unwilling to reveal the exact figure allocated to the project or detail how it will be spent, instead citing administration and ‘staff costs’

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as the main money-burners” (Mythen 2005). Mythen’s report leads with the suggestion that the Map may enter the Guinness Book of Records as the largest knitted textile in the world. The reporter also mentions the technology, noting that it is “inspired by a computer programme that tracks weather conditions, traffic, temperatures and activity throughout the city and manipulates the information into corresponding knitting patterns” (2005), and she conducts an interview with the Map’s project coordinator Susan Tector Sands. While the editorial choice of words such as ‘bizarre’ and ‘mystery’ frame The Knitting Map as a kind of oddity, direct quotes from Tector-Sands also help to present the piece as a vibrant community project, if not necessarily a piece of art: “[w]e set out to dispel the myth that knitting was old-fashioned by taking it out and knitting in weird places . . . soon people started to realise that knitting is young, funky and sexy” (qtd. in Mythen 2005). A week later, Inside Cork published a comment piece by Mythen, which was part of a regular ‘Katie On Thursday’ slot. The piece takes aim at the Map, with the headline reading “An Army of Knutters!” and Mythen beginning her piece in broad, scornful tones: “An absolute Frankensteinesque creation, the controversial Knitting Map has been baffling people since the first stitch” (Mythen 2005: 10). She compares the work to a giant jumper, wondering whether the speed-knitting champion of the world would be interested in getting involved, and describes the Map as a “rectangle of shame” (2005: 10). Given that it is a comment piece, Mythen is within her rights to take any tone she wishes; nonetheless, her sarcasm bites, as she both denigrates the Map and focuses on its costs: “The ‘project’ is rumoured to have received over €300,000 in funding and will result in the creation of a big multicoloured rectangle almost five times the size of the County Hall” (2005: 10). Mythen wonders why the volunteer knitters are not being paid, a question also raised in a letter published in the Irish Examiner by Cork art historian Vera Ryan: “[w]ill future feminists and/or historians see these generous knitters as exploited or honoured by concepts of partaking in history?” (Ryan 2005). However, such voluntary interaction with art projects is common. Corcadorca Theatre Company, which produced RelocaFigure 3.3  ‘An Army of Knutters!’ by Katie Mythen, Inside Cork, 17 March 2005. tion, the largest Cork 2005 project,

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often works with a large community cast of volunteers, as it did that year. More recently, artist Rita Duffy involved the Irish Countrywomen’s Association in the production of her project Souvenir Shop, funded by the Arts Council, to commemorate the centenary of Ireland’s 1916 rising.8 Numerous volunteers, including ceramicists and needle-workers, also contributed to Judy Chicago’s cooperative project The Dinner Party (1979). Given the fact that The Knitting Map sits squarely within such history and context, it is hard to know what to do with the objections to the use of volunteers, save to suggest it is likely that the criticisms came about as a result of a deeper unease with the project itself, which was, essentially, the sense that it was not worth the time or money allocated to it: “[w]ith a determined voluntary part-time director, some creative use of school and community halls and a fraction of the €300,000, could the project not have gone ahead at a fraction of the cost?” (Mythen 2005: 10). Conversely, the volunteer knitters were quoted as having benefitted from their participation in the project, telling RTÉ news: “I just love it, I enjoy the company and there’s a great community spirit”, and “[w]hen you see the way it’s growing, I think we’re really doing something very special here”, and “[i]t’s a nice way of being involved in Cork 2005 and it’s a way that I can contribute” (qtd. in Murphy 2005). Another knitter told the Irish Examiner “[a]ll the time you’re aware that you’re part of something huge, something that the whole world knows about” (qtd. in Kerrigan 2005: 8). At the symposium, one knitter indicated that she and other participants had felt the negative criticism of the Map personally, stating that the knitters were very, very disappointed in what went on; I know that personally, myself, I was and I think that it was the media, it was all the media, that’s the feeling I got. I was very saddened with it. People were saying things to me and I was very confused and upset over it because we had worked very, very hard. We enjoyed what we were after doing and it was for Cork city and all the people that did get involved. It was very, very hurtful to hear that. (transcription from video documentation of The Knitting Map symposium, Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland, 2015) Many of the reasons offered for the criticism of The Knitting Map have centred on the notion that Cork audiences did not want to be associated with the homely craft of knitting, especially not as a flagship project for Cork 2005 (Barkun and Gilson 2010: 8), and it is largely accurate to suggest that much of the media commentary, even when it was positive, did not contextualise the project as a piece of art. The further assertion that the newly wealthy Ireland of 2005, aware of its historical feminisation by colonial Britain as a form of abuse, couldn’t stand to be represented internationally by an “excess of femininity” (Barkun and Gilson 2010: 8), also bears some consideration. That historic feminisation has long impacted upon the overriding narrative formed about and for Irish women, as Edna O’Brien reminds us in her autobiographical book Mother Ireland: “These infiltrations have been told and fabricated by men and by mediums who described the violation of her body and soul” (O’Brien 1978: 11). One has only to look at the Irish Constitution,9 which continues to prioritise a woman’s domestic role over work outside the home, to understand why some Irish women may have sought to reject the craft of

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knitting, which the Map was taken by many to represent. As a schoolgirl growing up in 1970s Ireland, crafts such as knitting and sewing were forced upon me, and I was judged – often harshly – by my (in)ability to knit one, purl one. Such early incisions cut deep, and, as I grew up and sought to take my place in a world where, thankfully, I didn’t have to craft, a lot of my self-worth was, inevitably, bound up with the repudiation of the role constructed for me by the Irish State. The argument is a complicated one, but it speaks to some of the points raised by Lucy Lippard, who discusses the split in the feminist art movement between those who sought to reclaim crafting and those who described it, as Germaine Greer did, as “an exercise in futility” (qtd. in Lippard 2015: 5), where “[t]oo many sisters fought to free women from aprons and mops for me to voluntarily become Aunt Bee and pretend it’s by choice” (Jameson, qtd. in Lippard 2015: 6). Why didn’t I cover The Knitting Map? For the radio, I interviewed the late writer and painter John Berger, the artist Tacita Dean and the architect Daniel Libeskind; I wrote about plays presented by Neil LaBute and Corcadorca – all projects associated with the cultural year. Of the eight flagship projects announced in July 2003, I reported on only one, reviewing Conal Creedon’s play Second City Trilogy for the Sunday Tribune. No producer or editor asked me to, either. Still, watching Dr Jo Turney discuss the common phrases used to describe knitting groups (“knit and natter”, “stitch and bitch”), where she notes that “it’s the language that we use, the phrases that we use, the things

Figure 3.4  President Mary McAleese meets Knitting Map participants. Photography by Michael McSweeney, Provision Photography. From ‘President launches anthology of work by Cork city pupils’ by Olivia Kelleher, Irish Times, 30 November 2005.

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we just take for granted, that actually build up an understanding of what knitting means in a wider context” (Turney 2015), made me wince in recognition. Has any woman not been mocked by a man, at least once in her lifetime, for the fact that her voice is several octaves higher than that of the average adult male? Has she not been reduced to an irrational mess of emotions? How many times have I heard women’s circles of whatever ilk – writing, knitting, politics – dismissively referred to by men – some men, and yes, some women – as a “bunch of lesbians”, the assumption being that these groups are less relevant or worthy than men’s or gender-inclusive groups, and, of course, because homosexual women are on the very margins of society, their voices and activities are easy to ridicule. In 2005, I lived a life focused around work, career, socialising – attempting to ignore the Constitution in a way that it has not ignored me, and attempting, I believe now, to operate within the confines of a patriarchal world rather than pushing against it. Over a decade later, with my circumstances changed, my life is more domestically focused, and I am more open to acknowledging the value of those – still primarily women – who occupy this private arena. The Knitting Map, wrote Gilson, was borne of “an idea about imagining that women’s lives mattered powerfully, that the skills they had in their hands, often learnt from their mothers and grandmothers, might have real and powerful cultural space” (Gilson, 2015). Is this so difficult to accept? Feminist activist Gloria Steinem suggests that it is, stating that because most of us are raised by women, because we see, in a deep sense, female authority as appropriate to the home and childhood, but we haven’t seen it enough in the outside world, so that we may still feel it’s inappropriate or too emotional or too overwhelming because we’ve experienced it as home. (qtd. on Marian Finucane 2016) At this distance, bearing in mind the way narrative is created, and given that we all create complex narratives for our lives, I can suggest that I, too, may well have played my part in that lack of acceptance. Cork 2005 took place in advance of Ireland’s great recession in 2008, and during the years after the crash media reports suggested a widespread revival of traditional crafts across the country. It took place before the development of an interdisciplinary degree in glass, ceramics and textiles at Cork’s Crawford College of Art and Design, and before the setting up of the annual MAKE symposium, which is designed to highlight contemporary issues concerning making both in Cork and internationally. If one is to suggest that these local developments follow on, in some capacity, from The Knitting Map, one can therefore also pose the question: If The Knitting Map were made today, would the project still be considered controversial? Critics such as Mick Hannigan argue – perhaps somewhat patronisingly – that it remains problematic in terms of concept, cost and outcome: I have no doubt that the process was wonderful, you bring people together, working together, having tea and biscuits together. All of these human interactions are very valuable and it’s great that a whole range of people were able to feel a part of it. So there’s no doubting the process and the value of the Textiles, Community and Controversy    44

process. The questions are: At what cost? And the end result? For one businessman’s smart-alecky comment, for that to represent the serious questions that there were about The Knitting Map project and this was independent of knitting, who was doing the knitting, of where they were doing the knitting, it was the project – that there was a project within 2005 about which there was a lot of questions getting a large sum of money which wasn’t revealed. (Hannigan 2016) It is worth remembering that the civic, communal nature of a City of Culture award attracts a myriad of voices, many of whom feel – justifiably – entitled to speak on behalf of their own place. At the 2015 symposium, Jools Gilson told listeners that although she had been involved in the fusion of dance and technology for at least a decade before 2005, she had been working largely in a niche arena, with performances and installations attracting audiences often already interested in and sympathetic to the work. While The Knitting Map was featured on the Arts pages of newspapers such as the Irish Examiner and the Irish Times, it was also covered in News, Lifestyle and Comment pages and written about by nonspecialist journalists. One can argue whether this should be the case or not; however it is the case, given the largescale public and unusual nature of the project. It means a lot of voices, many of them sceptical, arrive to the party, and it asks a lot of the language and explanations offered by those involved in choosing and delivering the work. There were frequent criticisms of Cork 2005’s communication strategy, with then-lecturer at the Cork School of Music Gerry Kelly telling Donal Lynch to ask Aoife Carlin “[w]hat her press background is! Ask her why she hasn’t contacted RTE Cork? Ask her whom in Lyric FM she is dealing with! I’ve been in this business a long time and the press releases are pathetic” (Kelly, qtd. in Lynch 2005: 26). However, the official promotion of The Knitting Map appears, to this journalist, no better or worse than any piece of general writing attempting to distill a complicated art project. Journalists did discuss the technological aspect of the work; however, that does not mean it was fully understood, either by the general Figure 3.5  ‘The Knitting Map’, European Capital of Culture 2005, Irish reporters who often covered the piece Examiner, p. 9, 8 Oct 2004. Chapter 3  The Knitting Map and the media    45

or by the public reading or hearing about it. One of the most compelling articles about the Map was penned by Gilson to coincide with the 2015 exhibition in the Glucksman: “I thought – what if we look at the movement of a whole city instead of a single dancer (as I had been doing), and connected this to the complexity of knitting stitch? And what if the colour of the wool was linked to the weather?” (Gilson 2015). This suggests at least the possibility that the project could have been more clearly translated to a general public in 2005, or that there were different ways of talking about it. Even the more specialist arts coverage tended to engage with The Knitting Map as a community rather than an artistic project, meaning there was little critical engagement with the Map’s concept and execution. The closest arts journalist Mary Leland came to critically interrogating the project was to state that “the realisation dawns that the map is not quixotic or inconsequential: the work goes on, overseen by a project co-ordinator and going right ahead, as promised” (Leland 2005), while a 2015 radio piece on the classical music and cultural radio station RTE Lyric FM (Clancy 2015) is beautifully crafted but does not offer a critical interrogation of the project – which, to be fair, is not the show’s remit. Only an end-of-year piece published on the Irish Examiner’s arts page in 2005 attempted to engage critically with the Map, setting a long and reasonably balanced report on the problems encountered by the project alongside a short review, which weighs praise of the Map’s “sense of community” alongside aesthetic concerns: “the size and colours of the knitted ‘map’ are impressive at first sight but this is a momentary sensation – after all, there is only so much of one’s life that can be passed looking at a giant blanket. Frankly, an actual map would have been more interesting” (McNamee 2005: 13). One can suggest that the writer of the piece, Joe McNamee, is simply meeting the project on its own merits; however, it is also possible McNamee has by now been influenced by the controversy, as he too raises the issue of the Map’s funding (McNamee 2005: 12). The fact that The Knitting Map was primarily process-driven, in many ways ephemeral, but nonetheless with a tangible end result, also engendered, it appears, some of the uncertainty regarding how to approach it critically, as well as some of the negative assertions about the outcome. Indeed, the one review of the project that was published outside of the mainstream Irish press also appeared to focus on the end result, with Corkbased critic Sarah Kelleher’s assertion that in formal terms The Knitting Map is “simply enervating and dull” (Kelleher 2015). Kelleher’s response to the project echoed that of McNamee and was even more harshly expressed, describing the Map as “an inert, sludgy pool of wool” (Kelleher 2015). Unlike McNamee, Kelleher came fresh to the work in 2015, but she is not unaware of the controversy and, although she doesn’t discuss the cost of the project, her review appears to follow McNamee’s in raising questions about the decision to fund the Map in the first place: “As a concept, doubtless, it ticked many boxes for those dispensing funding – it engaged the ‘community’, it was ‘collective’, it employed sophisticated ‘technology’ and cosy ‘craft’ simultaneously” (Kelleher 2015). Since 2005, several narratives have encircled The Knitting Map: that it was misunderstood, that it is controversial and, for a short time (possibly prompted by the fact that the Map has yet to find a permanent home in Cork city), several (incorrect) reports that the project had been lost. The staging of the 2015 symposium was a brave

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decision on Gilson’s part – as are the various written interrogations she has carried out since 2005, including a 2012 article that attempted “a navigation of failures”: “[c]ommunity is messy and disorderly, as are the cities they compose. We came to accept that what happened during our year of knitting was the project, and eventually understand that such an audacious work could not have been completed without struggle or challenge” (Gilson 2012: 15–16). The symposium, held in Cork, but involving some international visitors and cool heads, was challenging and stimulating, although, to my mind, the issue of the media coverage of The Knitting Map was best contextualised during Sarah Foster’s presentation, when she noted that [i]f we think about how things are going to be described, they’re going to be described very differently by a journalist on an evening paper, who’s on a deadline, who only has a short time to write something, or an art historian or a design historian or whatever. We’re dealing with two very different modes here. (O’Connor 2015) Foster also highlighted the problem, as she saw it, which ran through the discourse of the 2005 year: “[t]here are different languages, there are different agendas, there are different constituencies and they don’t always understand each other” (O’Connor 2015). The Knitting Map was chosen, wrote Cork 2005 commissioner Tom McCarthy, because “it opens out to so many people” (McCarthy 2005: 123). It is that very openness that allowed the many voices to enter into the mix and it is testament to the Map’s power that it captured the imagination as it did, even if this was not always in positive ways. The Irish media – particularly in Cork – highlighted the criticisms put forward of Cork 2005 and of The Knitting Map and, at times, even drove the narrative in a particular direction. The media also frequently gave Gilson space to voice her own version of the story, even if she was often placed on the defensive in doing so, while those knitting the Map were also not silenced. Nonetheless, because of the manner in which news operates, and because of the way in which editorial decisions are made, the knitters’ quiet dignity and pride did not hit the front pages in the way that questions surrounding the funding of the Map did. The Knitting Map had a gentle birth and a turbulent adolescence. As it matures, along with Irish society, and as it resolutely refuses to become lost or to disappear, arguing for both its visibility and the visibility of those who made it, it continues to cause conflict. The mainstream news and cultural media also continue to report on the Map; the exhibition at The Glucksman was covered by RTÉ television (O’Sullivan 2015), where the Map was described as ‘controversial’ and ‘infamous’. It was reported on by RTÉ Lyric FM, and also in the news section of Irish Examiner, with the Examiner’s headline stating that the “[c]ontroversial knitted map of Cork [is] being dusted down for public display” (English 2015). The accuracy of this headline was reflected in the subsequent discussions at the symposium, which was attended by Mick Hannigan, who once again made vocal his criticisms of the project. Although the Examiner interviewed Gilson for

Chapter 3  The Knitting Map and the media    47

its news piece, published in January 2015, it did not extend or deepen its reporting of the 2015 event, either by sending a journalist to the symposium in May of that year, or by reviewing the exhibition A Stitch in Time: The Fabric of Contemporary Life, curated by Fiona Kearney and Chris Clarke – which ran from April to July 2015 – something that could have added more nuance to the coverage. This is, as I have suggested, a common feature of how the media operates, especially in what are now economically straitened times, in which declining staff numbers mean journalists do more for less and there is an increasing reliance on less experienced or freelance reporters. The newspaper did, on the other hand, publish another news piece closer to the exhibition date, which gave more details on the exhibition and symposium; Gilson was, once again, interviewed for this. This article also included the word ‘controversial’ but the headline was somewhat milder than that of the January piece, reading, “A stitch in time still stirs debate at UCC’s Glucksman Gallery” (Sheridan 2015). Recently, Gilson noted that the “story of what happened to the map is as much a part of the meaning of the map as the map itself” (qtd. in English 2015). There were many factors inherent in the creation of that story, and the media, itself part of the establishment and given to conservative commentary, was a significant one. However, the Map’s story is not set in stone; it is a flexible narrative that continues to unfold, and that may one day lose the title ‘controversial’ and settle down, become part of the folklore of the City of Cork, etched into its history and community. For the moment, however, it continues to be worth arguing about.

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4

Busywork The real thing Lucy R. Lippard

M

ore than two thousand women altogether, ranging across age, class, and culture, but many of them older, quietly knitting in small groups in a bus, at a wool factory, a women’s prison, a train station, a sexual violence centre and every day in the crypt of a church in the city of Cork. A wild woman knitting on the back of a motorcycle, or dancing in a knitted bus driver’s uniform, or tangling delighted children in skeins of yarn. More than the lovely end product of all this busy work, these images are what distinguish half/angel’s Knitting Map. Comfortably placed next to each other in “stations”, with occasional tea breaks, the knitters followed the instructions of computers reporting on the weather (determining the colours of yarn) and real-time urban activity (determining the complexity of stitches). Defined as “a large-scale durational community textile installation”, The Knitting Map, commissioned for the City of Cork as European Capital of Culture 2005, was expansive, communicative, collaborative, multicultural and at times avant-garde. It offered an urban portrait, a cacophony of individual life stories, laughter, street performances, public support . . . and controversy. In the 1970s, feminists discovered our own traditional arts and adamantly denied the conventional gap between high and low arts, revivifying quilting, knitting, china painting and needlework, most notably in Judy Chicago’s cooperative artwork, The Dinner Party.

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The rhythmic, repetitive, modular power of women’s traditional arts struck a chord with artists who became successful within the art world, like Ann Hamilton, Louise Bourgeois, Faith Ringgold and Harmony Hammond.1 In 1977, I found myself writing about women’s hobby arts – “Making Something from Nothing” (1977–78: 62–65) – and considering the conflation of art and work in the lives of working-class women. At the time, I wondered whether the feminist art world would be “absorbed by the patriarchal art world”. If so (yes, it happened), to what extent could an “art of making” be reconciled with all the varying criteria that determine aesthetic “quality”? I hoped for a utopian era of visual consciousness in which the idea is to “transform and give meaning to all things”, when Good Taste “will vary from place to place, from home to home”. The Knitting Map can be viewed as a significant step in that journey. Time was an integral part of The Knitting Map’s process, which began in 2004 – time in the sense of national and personal histories, bonding, social life and the long drawn-out story of an artwork. Codirectors Jools Gilson and Richard Povall, trained in dance, theatre and installation, aspired to “re-work the relationship between femininity and power in an Irish context” (Gilson 2012: 10). They emphasised public process over product, a longtime feminist strategy. The project was first publicised in wool shops, where a newsletter was distributed and volunteers signed up. A core group of knitters collaborated in the subsequent development. Project Manager Kate O’Brien, who had hosted a knitting show on Irish national TV, with Assistant Project Manager Susan Tector Sands, understood how to grade stitch complexity, which stitches would be complimentary and which were just too difficult. They also collaborated in the choice of colours to represent weather data. Then the process proceeded to lively public knit ins, accompanied by solo performances by Gilson, who was fascinated by the “complex choreography” of textile practices. “What happens when the stuff of metaphor is made material?” she asked (2005: 11). The moving and often devastating life stories the knitters told to each other (and to the editor of a book, McCarthy 2005), became a part of the process, an invisible armature for the artwork finally displayed. And every day the great coverlet grew in the hands of a changing cast of twenty women in the crypt of St Luke’s Church. Because the colours of The Knitting Map are dependent on the weather, it evokes what author Kieran McCarthy called “new living landscapes” (2005: 15), bringing the rural to the urban, conjuring up the sheep that provided the wool and the fields on which they grazed. In a 1977 essay on Aran sweaters and kitchens, Patricia Patterson wrote that the coarse, encrusted, inventive textures of the sweaters resembled “the fissured and gashed surface of the island”. She also noted that the women “dress against the dourness of the island in bright primary colors, floral-print cottons and plaids” while the men “wear the colors of the landscape, brindled gray pants and sweaters, dark browns and dark blues, which harmonize with the stone walls, the fields, the sweep of limestone” (Patterson 1977–78). The landscape references are apt. When The Knitting Map was in production, the fabric flowed like a river with bursting tributaries. When it was on public display in

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Pennsylvania, the vast scape of folds – the size of a tennis court – rose up, rumpled, suggesting breaking waves or a rifted landscape. Even the names of the yarns evoke gardens, nature and place: Amethyst, Devon Blue, Sand, Glencoe, Sandstorm, Storm Cloud, Heather, Stone . . . as do the names of the stitches, a fusion of the wild and the domestic: honeycombs, cables, lattices; Moss Stitch, Tree of Life, Lobster Claw, Diamond Trellis. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m writing this in winter, absorbed by the beiges and blues of the rangeland and mountains beyond my window. I’m wearing sturdy lavender socks knitted by my cousin Anne and a hand-made alpaca sweater vest sent by a friend from Bolivia. That’s pretty much my history with the medium, aside from an ill-fated project of sweaters for my parents one Christmas while I was in college. My father couldn’t get his over his head, and my thriftily well-dressed mother wouldn’t have been caught dead in her lumpy garment. In the 1950s, professors were annoyed by stray knitting needles clicking down the steps of lecture halls. Today the competition is much stiffer – words and screens. The Knitting Map combines the two in an unexpected fusion of high and low tech. (Lucy Lippard 2015)

The Knitting Map is feminist by intention and is perceived as such by those familiar with the art world and the women’s movement, but perhaps not by many of the knitters themselves or by a portion of the public misled by the media, where the project was often described as a literal city map. Later, often without seeing the work, reporters complained bitterly about the money spent on “a pack of oul’ biddies knitting” (quoted in Lynch 2005: 26) (Yes! And isn’t that a lovely sight?) There is no question that the project was truly meaningful to the knitters themselves, who staunchly defended it in the media and indirectly challenged the cliché of the tortured artist struggling to express himself in isolation. Unlike the lone artist in her studio, every move made by the hordes of volunteer knitters did not involve artistic decisions. They were not so much collaborators as creative co-operators, like actors in a play, which takes nothing away from their accomplishments.2 The Knitting Map became a catalyst and even a catharsis – communication, linked by creative energies, channelled in turn by the frame of the project itself. The resulting fusion of all these diverse elements is arguably as transgressive as much so-called advanced art. Yet despite the volumes of press and local support, the controversies it caused are instructive. One problem was the price, which half/angel was not permitted to divulge at the time: €258,000, which provided staff, space and materials over three years. Feminists justifiably perceived the press attacks as generic, aimed at the “culturally disenfranchised” (Gilson 2012: 10) – older and working-class women not trained as “artists.” Gilson warned of a cultural trope: old women are bad news in fairy tales and nightmares. She attributes the map’s sporadically poor reception to the context of Cork and Ireland in 2005 – “the powerful injuries of history . . . symbolic, colonial, and sexual

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Figure 4.1  Amy Schmierbach, Scarf (Detail), weaving, collected yarns, 50' × 18', 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

. . . the troubled relationship to wealth, and who has public permission to be valued and to be an artist . . . an astonishment that so much money and time had been dedicated to something that didn’t matter” (2012: 18). The hackneyed questions “But is it art?” and “Are they artists?” are outdated and irrelevant in 2018. In a paean to the medium, Gilson waxed lyrical about the “densities of colour, the drench of lilac drifting up from the crypt floor . . . Knitting is an enchantment of the hands and fingers, a moving latticework of wool and winding and tension” (2012: 12). Knitter Amy Schmierbach encourages people to touch her art (“I can just wash it”) and says of knitting: “It’s calming, it’s cathartic. I know you’re not supposed to say that about art” (2013: 53) That comment reflects the mainstream’s lack of respect for useful art. Years ago I found this awful exchange in a crafts publication: “Student: Is it art or craft? Teacher: What difference does it make if you enjoy doing

Figure 4.2  Amy Schmierbach, Touch, crocheted polyester yarn, 12' × 12', 2002. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 4.3  Amy Schmierbach, Touch (Detail), crocheted polyester yarn 12’ X 12’, 2002. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 4.4  Amy Schmierbach, Stretch, handspun wool, crocheted iron weights, 8' × 5', 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 4.5  Liz Collins, Knitting Nation, Phase 6 Mapping, Tillinghast Farm in Barrington, RI, 2011. Image courtesy of the artist.

it? Student: If it’s not art, I’m not going to keep doing it.” Since the 1970s, knitting has gone public and even thrived in the international art world: Along with “fibre sculpture” and other more formal artforms, there are knit ins; cozies on tanks, buses, fences or parking meters; and “yarn bombs” employing a female-dominated medium to challenge the male-dominated field of graffiti. Rachel Gomme and London’s Cast Off group are among those who have popularised knitting outdoors.3 Liz Collins’ Knitting Nation functions “as a commentary on how humans interact with machines, global manufacturing, trade and labor, brand iconography, and fashion” producing day-long performances with miles of yarn.4 Closer to (my) home, the worldwide movement of guerrilla knitters includes Santa Fe artist Shirley Klinghoffer, who once cozied a Humvee. I googled “knitting/art” to see what

Figure 4.6  Liz Collins, Knitting Nation, Phase 12 H20, ­Occidental College, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 4.7  Rachel Gomme, A Year of Waiting, 4.5 m of knitted yarn, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 4.8  Rachel Gomme, Hour (for Penelope), durational performance, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 4.9  Rachel Gomme, Ravel, durational performance, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.

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was going on now. A woman called Naida knits “poop plushies” (don’t ask). A team of women called Gelitin knitted a 200’ long, 20’ high pink bunny rabbit with its organs spilling out that resides on a rural hillside in Italy. And Casey Jenkins in Melbourne, Australia, member of an art activist group called Craft Cartel, performed a 28-day piece called Casting Off My Womb knitting from yarn stowed in her vagina – shades of Carolee Schneemann’s famous Interior Scroll. Then there are the knitted hoods of Pussy Riot (and the IRA). And this is only the tip of the needle. As Magda Sayeg, who knit a huge cozy for a London double-decker bus, says, “Knitting is bad ass!” (Sayeg 2015). Men have followed suit. Mark Newport’s Sweaterman and knitted superhero masks take on the myths of masculinity. Jaanus Samma, a gay male Estonian artist, is working with knitters to produce shaggy handmade sweaters featuring “offensive texts” derived from queer bathroom graffiti, expressed in a “warm and intimate” medium. Dave Figure 4.10  Rachel Gomme, Ravel, map, 2014. Image courtesy of Cole knitted a baby’s snowsuit out of the artist. a Gulf War-era bulletproof vest, and a huge American flag on July 4, 2005, executed by two crane-like John Deere excavators wielding two-foot needles. Adrian Esparza’s large-scale, abstract serapes and pieces made from Salvation Army T-shirts comment on class and immigration on the US–Mexico border. Such political uses of the medium build on longtime feminist strategies, from the protests at Greenham Common (where some thirty thousand women protested the installation of US cruise missiles in the early 1980s) to Marianne Jørgenson’s pink, white and lavender patchwork cozy for a military tank, “contrasting the weaponry with the familiarity and safety” of the process, among other anti-war women fibre artists, including Peace Knits in Canada, opposing the Iraq war. On the other end of the spectrum, Nero fiddled, Madame Defarge knitted. There has long been a split in the feminist art movement between those who aspire to equality in the male world/art world with work and theory rarely distinguishable from that produced by men, and those who envision a social transformation incorporating all the denigrated aspects of “femininity”. Beginning with Germaine Greer,

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Figure 4.11  Casey Jenkins, Casting Off My Womb (Detail), performance, Darwin Visual Arts Association, Northern Territory, Australia, 2013. Image copyright of the artist.

who described crafting as “an exercise in futility” (Greer 2007), the radical crafts movement has at times come under attack from those on the feminist Left who see knitting as stereotypical and inherently conservative. Tonya Jameson, for instance: “Too many sisters fought to free women from aprons and mops for me to voluntarily become Aunt Bee and pretend it’s by choice” (Robinson 2010: 191). Even Greenham Common has been criticised for implying that “if there were no nuclear threat, they could go on being nice ordinary women and all would be OK” (Lynn Alderson, quoted in Robinson: 189). Knit artist Cat Mazza (who has also invoked the textile mills of the early industrial age) connects positively to women knitting for the troops in past wars, while scholar Kirsty Robinson records a more negative take on that history, She asks provocatively, “Is it possible that the political effectiveness of radical craft practice

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Figure 4.12  Adrian Esparza, Untitled, serape diptych, wood, paint, nails, serape, 2013. Copyright courtesy of the Cris Worley Gallery. Image Courtesy of the Cindy Rucker Gallery.

Figure 4.13  Mark Newport, Real Heros Series, rawhide kid, hand-knit acrylic and buttons, 80' × 23' × 6', 2004. Image courtesy of the artist.

relies inherently on the gendering of textile work?” Does knitting for political change in some areas rely on “their subjugation in others?” (186).5 Craftspeople, whose language is in their hands, often cross classes and cultures more easily than most so-called fine artists, who are still perceived as elitist, irrelevant or deranged. Only in Western cultures, where capitalism depends on commodity, have these integral parts of life been separated from each other so firmly and for so long. Dismissal of art’s potential functions is at the core of the false dichotomies between different art forms and art for different audiences, the dichotomies on which attacks on The Knitting Map are based and that still rule the dissimilar “worlds” of arts and crafts. However, despite the fact that the hierarchy of art over craft is far from dismantled, the doors are cracking open, the walls are crumbling. Witness the global movement around the just and sustainable production of food as art and the increasing use of fibre as an accepted material on the cutting edge. Had The Knitting Map’s critics been less ignorant, they could have boasted of their participation in an international trend. Now they have another chance, as the piece is welcomed back into the world. Like many other currently unrecognised communal/collaborative/collective/cooperative endeavours or exchanges, once given the freedom of its own context, perhaps it will finally be recognised for what it is: art (whatever that means).

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5

The edge of the Map Nicola Moffat

“later that night i held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered where does it hurt? it answered everywhere everywhere everywhere” (Shire 2015: 15–23) *** There is no map of Heaven that earthly hands have touched. *** 51.8969°N, 8.4863°W

T

he Knitting Map is ostensibly a long woollen map that charts the weather and movement of people in the city of Cork for the year 2005. The knitted object that was hung in The Glucksman in April 2015 is its archive, but it is not the Map itself. What we have left of the Map is its outline, its trace, one we ghost

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with our fingers each time we feel the weight of the needles and the bite of the wool that forms our feminine heirloom. The Map disappeared in the making of it: who can now tell the stories that were passed into the wool by the hands of the women who knitted it? It gives a record of the weather but you can’t feel the rain on your face: Poetically and politically it was a work that sought to rework the urban territory of matter and meaning: knitting was used as something monumental – an abstract cartography of Cork generated by the city itself and its weather, and knitted every day for a year. To make such a gesture using feminine and female labour aspired to re-work the relationship between femininity and power in an Irish context: it gave cartographic authority to working-class older women from Cork, for a year. (Gilson, 2012: 10) *** Recent studies in cartography have come to focus on the performativity of mapmaking, where traditional forms have been critiqued for their ability to constitute cultural identities according to the narrative claims made by mapping. Because mapmaking has its roots in territorial expansion, the peoples designated and described by maps are necessarily subjugated and objectified by these maps, and have therefore found their identities constituted in a kind of subjection, as it were, to the maps and their makers. Christopher Perkins explains that mapping is not, in this sense, merely practice, but is social ­practice – a doing that simultaneously creates and perpetuates cultural values – and that the making of and use of maps is inseparable (2009: 2). The makers of The Knitting Map, its Dreamers and its Weavers, used the Map to tell their stories, to anchor the city with the weight of their lives. As one of its Dream Weavers, Jools Gilson, writes, [o]ur understanding of processes of cartography assumed a poetic plurality. Our map wasn’t literal, because such literality would not have allowed us space to be playful with how cartographic energies depict all kinds of geographies, from the tone of laughter of the cartographer, to how Mary was late on that Tuesday, to the vast impossible secrets of the complexity of knitting, to the floods in March, and the snow in November, and the heat of August, and the lull in October, to Ciara’s poor tension, and Maura’s cable, and nobody cleaned the toilets on Sunday so I had to do it before I could change the wool for Monday, to the valuing of women’s lives and community . . . (2012: 8–9) Some of the hands that worked the wool are now forever still, and it is their absence that the Map’s archive mourns. This essay charts a journey through grief, showing the holes left by bodies that our maps no longer contain. ***

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51.9056°N, 8.4596°W Stitch and bitch. About our husbands and the way they can’t seem to use their heads or their hands. About our children who run from us like rivers, t­ ripping over pebbles and the wettest summer in living history. About our twisted hands and the pain and the salve and the cold and the clickety-clacking of the needles. We knit it all in – the sounds of the city, the watchful eyes, the voice of ­condemnation condemning a nation. In it goes, plop, like sugar in tea, our special recipe. *** 17.8252°S, 31.0335°E // 34.1341°S, 18.4187°E This essay is a map to your body. X marks the spot where your bones were knit back together after your treehouse fall – I can recall your pain, but also the smell of the grass you wailed into. Over here is where you tasted granadilla for the first time, and my salivary glands pucker and gush with the memory of stringy yellow flesh and beady black pips. And here is where your daughter first fed, her hazel eyes contracting and focusing themselves on your face. Strictly speaking, I have no memory of these events, if they even occurred at all, but I am remembering them, that is, giving them a body in which to fill out what I knit here. This is because what I am missing is your body – the one that wrote me letters and sent them “par escargot” from Cape Town, the one that succumbed to cancer in September of 2007. *** This essay is a map to your body. *** Mapping is also a becoming (Perkins 2009: 2), of the space the map illustrates, of the bodies it attempts to fix within that space, and of the time and journey it attempts to archive (Perkins 2009: 2). The Knitting Map records the city of Cork becoming European City of Culture 2005, simultaneously recording the becoming-artists of the women who knitted it. But what does ‘becoming’ mean? In identity studies, the term is used to explain the formation of identity in ways that exceed the stasis and unity of the Western philosophical notion of Being. The movement from noun to imperfect verb signifies a ‘doing’ that takes place at the heart of identity (what is also known as

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identity practice or performativity), and indicates the fluctuating multiplicity of identity, which is ever-­changing as it comes into contact with other identities and affective states. This is also why the piece is called The Knitting Map, and not The Knitted Map, because the Map did so much of its ‘work’ as it was being made, encoding the individual identities of the hands that knitted it into stocking stitch, purl, cables and seed stitch. What is left of the Map, that is, its great woolly archive, cannot retell the stories of the individuals who made it, as they are now encrypted in stitch and colour. However, by existing as archive, the Map, in a sense, resurrects those who knitted it, much as a monument serves as a marker to where certain bodies once moved, danced, lived and breathed. In this way, the Map allows us to feel the presence of those we have lost. During a symposium on the ten-year anniversary of The Knitting Map, hosted by The Glucksman in April 2015, more than one speaker commented on the affectivity of the Map’s archive, how looking at this great Leviathan of wool as it swirled around the corners of the gallery invoked not just the presence of the thousands of hands that had made it, but reminded them of the hands that were missing from their lives. Because the hands that made the Map were overwhelmingly those of women, it also invited us to reflect on the invisibility of women’s labour, not only in regard to women’s crafts, but to the unpaid emotional labour that is still expected of women. One commentator noted that the Map reminded her of having her hair brushed by her grandmother. *** Your grandparents often found themselves in dark rooms, mapping out each other’s bodies, claiming whole countries with their mouths. (Shire 2011: 19–23) *** Which comes first, the territory or the map? Artists chart singular perceptions rather than assert meaning for any collective truth . . . Map-making as a whole is enhanced as each artist makes a mark on a bigger map, calling out I AM HERE. (Harmon and Clemans 2009: 15–16) *** 47.1522°S, 70.6627°W One of the first things The Knitting Map’s archive invoked for me were the cave paintings done thousands of years ago of the hands of our early ancestors, because looking at the Map, one can almost hear the number of hands it took to make it at work. These hands (of early cave dwellers and those that made the

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Map) are both present and absent. In a sense, the Map makes all of these hands present because of this chain of association, but you can’t see them. I think this is something our early ancestors understood when they left the outlines of their hands on cave walls for all eternity – painting gave them a way to live forever. The endurance of the handprints gave the next generation a way to touch the hands of those who had passed on, as well as the next, and the next after that. Those handprints allow us to travel back in time through touch, haunting us with the remaining presence of our long absent ancestors. *** One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. You must remember this. (Gaiman 2004: 189) *** 33.9249°S, 18.4241°E // 34.1437°S, 18.4362°E The edge of the map is scarred by the teeth of the waves that would bring the winter’s Southern Rights, the same grey family who visited every year. Like you, they would raise their voices to the firmament, offering to their watery god a mournful whale song that mapped their journey to your home in the Cape. They came back one last time, winding their way up the Benguela, when we scattered your ashes at Sunnycove. When they eventually departed, they carried you Lethewards on their expansive backs, these barnacle-encrusted psychopomps, your whale-boatmen. *** But maps are also objects; they are time travellers that connect us to the lost hands that once touched their edges. It is the performativity of this materiality that I want to outline here, against this wall of paper, against this wall of glass. I want to infect you with my grief for the bodies we lose when we draw up maps. Traditionally, cartography attempted to domesticate the monster of overseas territory, making it seem tameable, and thus the places that were uncharted were illustrated with all manner of strange creatures as the imaginations of the cartographers took over: “Their favourite haunts are those phantasmal boundaries where maps run out, ships slip moorings and navigators click their compasses shut. No man’s land. Land’s end. Out there, as the story goes, ‘Where the wild things are’” (Kearney 2003: 3). In order to make conquerable the territories these maps charted, cartographers drew them up according to their topographical content, making the land empty of life – that is, ripe for the taking. Maps have thereby deposed the bodies of the peoples they subjugated, but they themselves remain as material bodies

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that allow us to stretch our hands out into the vastness of that past that made them. Is it possible to make a map that reclaims the bodies of those that have been silenced by the constitutional effects of mapmaking, to count them in their millions where they were once erased? Is this part of what The Knitting Map performs? Part of The Knitting Map’s legacy is arguably its ability to bring these bodies to the fore of the map, not just regarding what it maps (the movement of people in the city in a given year), but specifically regarding who took part in the mapping. It comes as no surprise that, as with the other sciences, cartography has historically been dominated by men; the practice and theory of map-making is now being slowly utilised by feminist geographers, but also by feminist artists and performers. Nikolas H. Huffman writes that “[i]n contesting Figure 5.1  View looking towards the western window at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, exhithe masculinist vision of a universalised bition of The Knitting Map 2015. Image courtesy and transparently knowable space, femiof the Lewis Glucksman Gallery. Photograph by nist geographers have held up ‘the map’ Tomás Tyner. as the quintessential symbol of masculinist ways of knowing, the ultimate representation of masculinist space” (1997: 256). The Knitting Map’s archive can certainly be considered as anything but a “transparently knowable space” and, while this is arguably one of the reasons that the Map failed to reach so many people, this is also part of what it performs: it obfuscates in order to purposefully demonstrate the arrogance of male-dominated Western science to assume that nature can be reduced to easily-identifiable signs: “Vast stretches? Yes, but vast empty stretches” (Wood 2010: 44, his emphasis). *** 51.8969°N, 8.4863°W ( Jools) I made something for you that you couldn’t understand. There was no time to tell you that my body had also become a place where threads tangled like soldiers in barbed wire. I knitted and knitted and knitted. I knitted the world with my tongue, but it was a womb language you didn’t speak. I forgot to give you the legend, to weave you the myth, so you’d know your footing when the night was at its darkest. Instead, we all fell down.

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*** Like language, maps operate as a series of signs that supplement the thing itself, which is to say that a map can only work if its signs are translatable. Speaking of written language, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida explains that [t]o write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning, offering things and itself to be read and to be rewritten . . . For a writing to be a writing it must continue to “act” and to be readable even when what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems to have signed. (1988: 8) Therefore, if my map is to be translatable, understandable as map, the “mark” or series of marks it produces must function in my absence. It is for this reason that most maps, at least those that purport to direct one to a certain geographical space, also include within their borders a “legend”, or pictographic signs listed alongside their “translations”. In a sense, maps (like language) perform a promise – that one will be able to decipher one’s way according to its pictographic representation. *** Emergence of something new, from bits of now, past, place, data, mark, detritus, architectural parts, diagrammatic language, maps, lines, shapes, color, hue, synth, tempo, sonic, mutant. Pressure. Collapse time. Mine for resources, for parts to a future, refusing past tendencies, past actions that manifest into repeat patterns/repeat social actions/repeat repression/expansion of power . . . take the parts without judgment, break it, fuse it with marks, the creation of something other . . . a physical, sensorial, image, that is time-based, emergent experience. (Mehretu 2016: 274) *** Promises are what linguist J. L. Austin defines as illocutionary utterances, in that they perform the act that they describe through their very enunciation (1975: 101). Austin distinguished illocutionary performatives from perlocutionary utterances: where the illocutionary act of promising inaugurates a promise, the resulting perlocutionary response is making good on that promise (1975: 102). Derrida, however, points out the impossibility of guaranteeing the perlocutionary reply in Limited Inc (1988) because of the difference and deferral of meaning that opens up between the uttered promise and its perlocutionary reply: “Austin’s procedure . . . consists in r­ecognizing that the possibility of the negative (in this case, infelicities) is in fact a structural possibility, that failure is an essential risk

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of the operations under consideration” (Derrida 1988: 15). Much of Derrida’s writing concerns itself with the promise of the written sign, where, as Steve Sherlock notes, “[l]anguage promises meaning” (2014: 152), and, what is more, it “also promises value, inasmuch as . . . linguistic utterances necessarily enact (meaningful) values” (2014: 152). What Austin could not have foreseen by inaugurating the theory of linguistic performatives is that things other than speech can also perform acts by using the logic of the promise. Any fictional text, for example, uses this logic by “promising” to tell you what will happen next. Maps do something similar by promising one’s ability to navigate unknown terrain, or to give legible directions to assembling something, or to whisper the secret of one’s genetic makeup. What, then, does The Knitting Map promise? *** This essay is a map of your body. *** HAIKU As fine broekies’ lace On dun watered taffeta Is salt surf on sand (van Duyker, 2006)

Figure 5.2  The Knitting Map (Detail) at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, 2015. Image courtesy of the Lewis Glucksman Gallery. Photograph by Tomás Tyner.

*** Maps have numerous attractions. In the first place, like paintings, maps are graphic artifacts. There’s substantial formal continuity, especially with the painting of the second half of the 20th century and its grab bag of commitments to abstraction, surface, flatness, pattern, and formal systems of sign-making. Then too, like paintings, maps are communicative, that is, they are constructs by which one human (or group of humans) affects the state or behaviour of another (or others) in a communication situation. (Wood 2010: 215) ***

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34.1341°S, 18.4187°E This coast is now defined by its lack of whales, by the whale-shaped holes you left behind. Watchers would wait on the same promontories, armed with binoculars and telescopes that showed nothing but an empty grey expanse, this sea that stood between your death and me. I could have measured those holes, shown every manner of scientist how much emptiness was made with your departure. I would measure them according to the number of letters I would have received, the number of poems you would have written, the number of times you would have smoothed your daughter’s hair with hands that were no longer failing. Instead, I measure these gaps between us (Cape Town – Cork/ Death – Life/ mouth – ear) with the number of appliances you had to teach your husband how to use, with the huge number of mourners who paid their final respects, with the number of drowned refugees washed up on the beaches of the Mediterranean. *** 51.8969°N, 8.4863°W ( Jools) The European City of Culture 2005 was a promise, one of cultural transformation, and we were so excited about what this promise may beckon. But it fell flat. The perlocutionary response was one of fear, misunderstanding, and condemnation. And it hurt. *** The Agulhas Current flows south down the east coast of Africa, bringing warm waters from the Indian Ocean towards the Cape. The Agulhas takes its name from the Portuguese description of the southernmost point of Africa, which they called Cape Agulhas (34.8163°S, 20.0152°E), or the Cape of Needles. The Cape was so named because of its treacherous waters and terrible storms, which is why it often gets confused with the Cape of Storms (later named the Cape of Good Hope) and which lies 150 kilometres to the west (34.3568°S, 18.4740°E). The confluence of the warm Agulhas current with the cold waters of the Benguela Current between the two Capes allows for a rich variety of marine life in the Western Cape’s coastal regions, where you can spot animals as diverse as Jackass Penguins, Southern Right Whales and the notorious Great White Shark. *** 34.1341°S, 18.4187°E The last gift you gave me you had me pick out myself. You no longer had the strength to lift the needles, to wind the wool around your fingers. You Textiles, Community and Controversy    66

could only make a thing of holes, of absences, as if to show us how the cancer ate away at your spine, as if to rehearse your final disappearance. At the time, we could not understand the encryption; we had no Enigma machine to turn pain into language, code into a knitted garment. *** During the Second World War the Office of Censorship banned people from posting knitting patterns abroad in case they contained coded messages. There was one occasion when knitting was used for code. The Belgian resistance recruited old women whose windows overlooked railway yards to note the trains in their knitting. Basic stuff: purl one for this type of train, drop one for another type. (Oldfield and Mitchinson 2014) *** Maps also promise meaning – what you might expect to find when navigating a city, a sense of one’s general direction, even the “look” of a place may be inscribed in a map (I’m thinking of the kinds of maps one finds in tourist destinations that incorporate three-dimensional renditions of famous landmarks within a street grid). In so doing, the map promises legibility, that one will be able to understand how it works. This legibility is dependent on what Derrida names the iterability of the sign, or the sign’s intelligibility once it is used in a different context. Like writing, maps promise a material link between the time in which the map was made and the present, as well as promising one a future in which one will use it to navigate. Because of this, the promises embodied by maps are also never really present, but always reaching to the future. This is precisely why failure is necessitated by the performative act of promising (Derrida 1988: 15), because the future is radically unknowable: how can a map promise to show you the way when a city is always changing? *** “Like artworks, maps are selective about what they represent, and call out differences between collective knowledge and individual experience” (Harmon and Clemans 2009: 10). Perhaps the city always changes because we all use our own internal maps in which to navigate it. My map of Cork can’t possibly look exactly like yours, because I use different habits to pilot my way around the city; I walk different paths than those you tread. My map of Cork has changed since I arrived in the city in July 1998, and I don’t only mean that the physicality of the city has changed (although it has); what I mean is that I now traverse the city with different eyes than when I first got lost and found myself on the docks instead of at school in September 1998. If I were to draw it, the map that I used to find my way that September would include the green uniforms of other students, gratefully following the colour as if it were breadcrumbs. The ever-changing map of Cork city that I hold in my head is one that no hand has ever touched.

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*** 17.8252°S, 31.0335°E I wanted your hands grazing mine; I wanted the ghost of your fingertips outlined against the fabric. It would be more than we had touched while you were alive – a hand-me-down from Ireland, like your mother’s counting. “A haon, a dó, a trí”, as she pushed the stitches along the needle, and you’d giggle, your chubby fingers pressed against your mouth, your eyes glittering as you looked at your baby brother’s laughing face. Later, when you learned how to knit, you’d whisper the secret code to the wool, “A hen, a doe, a tree”. *** Looking at my dad’s atlas that’s been knocking around since the 1980s, the map of Eastern Europe promises me a detailed knowledge of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, of their bruised boundaries pricked out with barbed wire. Inasmuch as it imparts information of the territorial and topographical properties of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, it can’t tell me anything about the people who were contained within the confines of these borders. As a material object, a map has very little use, the way, say, a mug or a chair or a knitted jumper has. The only promise a map can truly fulfil is its own presence as material object, yet it constantly defers this presence by reaching for the past in which it was made, simultaneously reaching for a possible future in which you will use it. But I am thinking beyond use, beyond meaning, to touch, where I can also touch the hands of those who made the map. The map’s materiality allows me to not only speak to the dead but to touch them. In this way, the map’s performative materiality works less like writing and more like the remains of a building. *** Look at all these borders, foaming at the mouth with bodies broken and desperate. (Shire 2011: 23–25) *** Now, each time I wrap it around me (51.8969°N, 8.4863°W), I dress myself in the smell of your daughter’s childhood home (34.1341°S, 18.4187°E), and the stitches map out for me the vast network of cancerous cells that finally consumed you. Like Schrodinger’s cat, it is full of death, but it is also the last living vestige of your breathing body (33.9249°S, 18.4241°E), the final link in the chain that was our bond. Unless, of course, you count our shared DNA: how we both managed to inherit Great-Aunt Winifred’s breasts (33.9249°S,18.4241°E), but also GreatGreat-Uncle Graham’s propensity to write (55.8642°N, 4.2518°W). ***

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The map is a series of marks that produce meaning for the reader, but it continues to “act” only insofar as it is accurate. The maps of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in my dad’s old atlas cannot continue to act in the way that these maps were designed for, because they show political lines where none exist anymore. What they do perform, though, is a link to a political past, one that continues to constitute the identities of those who, up until very recently, understood their national identities according to those boundaries. *** [T]hinking about the map as representation had always been a mask, a cloak, a way of making the creative aspects of mapmaking . . . disappear. From their inception it had been essential that states appear as facts of nature, as real enduring things, things like mountains . . . (Wood 2010: 33) *** 51.8969°N, 8.4863°W I am knitting with the bones of your leftover poetry, splicing it with the flesh of the Langeberg and the wind from Chapman’s Peak (33.9249°S, 18.4241°E). The mountain’s spine runs the length of the map; I can feel each vertebra rise and dip against my finger as I trace your journey to death, the little depressions of earth that expose the outline of your hands, holes where you used to be. *** 34.8163°S, 20.0152°E The Portuguese called it the Cape of Needles, not only because it points out the southernmost tip of Africa, but because so many ships have been lost to its terrible waves and its frightening storms. Those needles are the teeth in the Cape’s jaws, but they weren’t enough to protect its coast from the colonising white men, who brought with them war, famine, pestilence and death. The Knitting Map’s knitters also had their needles, but they couldn’t fight the tide of criticism and ridicule piled on by the Irish media and the City of Culture’s cynical detractors. Figure 5.3  The Knitting Map being taken out of storage after 8 years, in 2015. half/angel.

***

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How, then, do we begin to define ourselves without drawing lines of division, separation and exclusion? How do I draw a map that constitutes everything that I am, without harming you? *** 51.8969°N, 8.4863°W (Jools) They called me a ‘living legend’ and they did this to shame me, to remind me that I’m no Roy Keane, no Daniel McAleese. Irony is often lost on those being ironic. And so, they made of me a legend, a convenient pariah who could be blamed for what they saw as a waste and a joke; I was the Pied Piper who led the women of Cork on a merry dance. *** This essay is a map to my body. *** Birth certificate: South African. Passport: British. Surname: Scottish (via the Normans, of course). Accent: Cork, boy. Ancestry: English, Scottish, French, Irish, Dutch, German, Spanish (that we know of). Nation state: my body. *** “I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me” (Anzaldúa 1999: 38). Gloria Anzaldúa writes of the weight of history that comes with carrying one’s genealogy, how it is mapped onto one’s body, into one’s blood and bones, so that one cannot escape the signs that point it out. For oppressed minorities, this comes with a certain sense of shame for who you are, as self-abjection for one’s skin colour and hair texture that hundreds of years of white hegemony have perpetuated. But I am a white woman. I was born in South Africa during apartheid. I have been allowed the privilege of leaving the country of my birth, to make a new life in a place where this is denied to others because their grandparents were not born here. The birth of others marks the legality of my residence. How can a person be illegal?

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In many ways, living in Cork has given me a new understanding of the person I would not have become if I had stayed in South Africa. I learned my privilege here, but I also learned how to laugh at myself. Anzaldúa’s quote resonates with me for this reason; I learned a new shame that I hadn’t before considered as an intrinsic part of my self. It was all an accident of birth. Years later, during a seminar I attended in my undergraduate final year, I was to find somebody who understood the visceral shame of national identity. My lecturer that year was German. He told us that waving his national flag in his childhood years only felt permissible during a soccer match. Now I understand why the Rainbow Nation needed a new flag, a new sign to wave, one that was connected with pride, not shame. I can’t shed my skin, I can’t make it into a new sign, but maybe that’s because it’s a tattooed reminder of my responsibility – to remember the violence carried out by and for white supremacy. *** 37.0344°N, 27.4305°E We fight our last corner among the thrashing waves and trip over rocks scattered across the dark beach. Too soft to be rocks, we realise with dawning dread. They sleep the last sleep, white foam edging the black blanket that slowly covers them.

Figure 5.4  The Knitting Map (Detail) from an exhibition at Millennium Hall, Cork, Ireland, 2006. half/angel.

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*** This essay is a map between our bodies. *** Maps don’t show the tired hands that charted them, or the hearts that beat with trepidation at the treacherous jaws of the ragged coast; they omit the loneliness and the heartache of leaving loved ones behind for months, even years, at a time. Maps can’t tell us how long the journey around each headland took, or what the human cost was in drawing them up. *** As the Map Affirms the State, the State Affirms the Map (Wood 2010: 33) *** A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias (Wilde 1909: 40). What we forget, however, is that “Humanity” is always already composed of immigrants and refugees. *** 51.8969°N, 8.4863°W ( Jools) green and blue fight each other around the corners of the gallery, where, on hands and knees, you lovingly manipulate the swelling wool into a waterfall, a river, and I can nearly hear it crashing against glass and concrete, a cacophonic susurrus of voices clambering over each other, trying to save themselves, file themselves in the memory bank of wool *** The newspapers named it Cork’s biggest scarf, fearing it was lost somewhere in the in between, the fluid amid the continents. The only tangible bit of all

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that money. Unravelled, it could easily cover a hundred bodies for the Calais winter. But who would volunteer to do the unravelling? And who would knit all those jumpers? *** Cork City’s motto is Statio Bene Fida Carinis – A Safe Harbour for Ships *** 51.8969°N, 8.4863°W // 34.1341°S, 18.4187°E When I knit, as when I write, I summon your ghost. If I give you knitted organs, the cancer can’t grow; if I give you writing instead of blood, you could be sustained by poetry. So I weave you from wool and words, and make a new aunt who I still can’t touch. *** 39.2645°N, 26.2777°E // 37.0344°N, 27.4305°E Would all the paper from all the maps be capable of making a raft big enough to stop the drowning of children? What use are these maps if all they do is show the outlines of bodies on the European coastline? Or are the borders of Europe made by bodies, bloated, beached, lungs full of the salt water that promised to free them? *** I hear them say go home, I hear them say fucking immigrants, fucking refugees. Are they really this arrogant? Do they not know that stability is like a lover with a sweet mouth upon your body one second; the next you are a tremor lying on the floor covered in rubble and old currency waiting for its return. All I can say is, I was once like you, the apathy, the pity, the ungrateful placement and now my home is the mouth of a shark, now my home is the barrel of a gun. I’ll see you on the other side. (Shire 2011: 46–55) *** Map = nonsense = entropy = sublime. Prove it FUTILE (as futile as the marks themselves). (Mehretu 2016: 275) *** the cartographers who created the original maps that appear in [Joyce] Kozloff’s pieces were also mapping to better understand the relationship between people and places. But these maps sought to impose order and clarity on the irregularities and obfuscations of real geography. In military contexts, mapmaking was used to discover areas of strategic advantage or danger. The

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visual record is an abstraction of the military events that occurred or were being planned at these real places. The human element of real people enacting real acts of warfare on others is invisible. Yet Kozloff adds boyish and artistic human elements, creating cultural and psychological complexities and generating new functions and meanings for the original maps. (Harmon and Clemans, 2009: 41) *** 28.5395°S, 25.2126°E Practice makes perfect, your mammy would say, and you’d hold the holey thing up to the light, ashamed that you couldn’t even master the garter stitch. While you slept, she’d pull out the stitches for you and, with a neat neat hand, line them up like little white ducks. You can still see her neat neat hands as you look at your own grey ones, so you knit them in – a few white stitches among the blue to retrace the waddle of her duckies. *** 51.8969°N, 8.4863°W ( Jools) I forgot that I am the legend, that the way to read the Map is written on my body. My muscles burn and ache with the strain of it, but I must keep dancing, my feet pointing the way. Two tired needles, one stretching further and further across the globe while the other stays centred here in Cork, held together by those invisible stitches that make a life. *** The thread that you’ve left That I can’t grasp That I follow through labyrinthine corals That ties my heartstrings, The deep song that throbs Reverberates That follows the whale road That dies on the tide, Words  a human chain  that breaks Digging beneath the waves for the last of them, We find the bodies by song, by echolocation ***

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In the dead of the night, you can hear her shifting in her sleep; you can hear The Knitting Map whisper from her brief resting place on the coast. Sshhh, what is it she says . . . ? Here I am. I am reaching for you.

Legend/coordinates: 51.8969°N, 8.4863°W

Cork city, County Cork, Ireland, my home and the home of The Knitting Map’s architect, Jools Gilson.

51.9056°N, 8.4596°W

St Luke’s, a suburb of Cork city, where the Map was made.

33.9249°S, 18.4241°E

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa, where I was born and where my aunt, Linda van Duyker, died in 2007.

34.1341°S, 18.4187°E

Fish Hoek, a suburb of Cape Town and former fishing village, where Linda lived with her husband and daughter for more than twenty years.

34.1437°S, 18.4362°E

Sunnycove, a beach near Cape Town, where Linda liked to watch southern right whales as they journeyed using the Benguela current, and where her ashes were strewn by her daughter, husband and brother (my father).

17.8252°S, 31.0335°E

Harare, Mashonaland, Zimbabwe, formerly Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, where Linda, née Moffat, and my father, Russell, spent their childhood.

28.5394°S, 25.2126°E

Boshof, Free State, South Africa, where my mother, Anneli Moffat, née Blom, was born and spent her early childhood. My mother taught me how to knit and sometimes undid my stitches and reknitted my school projects when I wasn’t looking, because my knitting was so bad.

55.8642°N, 4.2518°W

Glasgow city, United Kingdom, where my great-great-uncle Graham Moffat lived, famous in his own life for the plays he wrote, directed and acted in. His most well-known play is Bunty Pulls the Strings (1910).

36.8915°N, 27.2877°E

Kos, Dodecanese Islands, Greece, where an estimated 1,000 refugees from the Middle East and North Africa are currently thought to flee to each day.

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50.9513°N, 1.8587°E

Calais, Pas-de-Calais, France, home to “The Jungle”, a refugee camp with notoriously terrible living conditions, where refugees hope to cross the English Channel in search of a better life.

37.0344°N, 27.4305°E

Bodrum, Mugˇla Province, Turkey, near to where Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Kurdish boy, was drowned on 2 September 2015, while trying, with his family, to escape persecution in Syria.

47.1522°S, 70.6627°W

Cueva de los Manos, Santa Cruz, Argentina, a series of caves where the outlines of human hands are depicted, dating back to 7300B.

34.8163°S, 20.0152°E

Cape Agulhas, or the Cape of Needles, the southernmost tip of Africa.

34.3568°S, 18.4740°E

Cape of Good Hope, formerly known as the Cape of Storms, which was incorrectly thought to be the southernmost tip of Africa, until Cape Agulhas was ‘discovered’.

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6

Knitting after making What we do with what we make Jessica Hemmings

T

he identity of The Knitting Map (2005) today raises questions about the potential difference in value between the act of making and its physical outcome. In an effort to understand these differences, I take as a starting point an interest in knitting as a verb, rather than a noun; knitting as an action and activity, rather than an object. Anthropologist Tim Ingold’s advocacy for a way of thinking ‘that assigns primacy to processes of formation as against their final products’ (2010: 2–3) may be useful to consider in this context. Ingold coins the acronym EWO or environment without objects (2010: 6) which he posits ‘not [as] a material world but a world of materials, of matter in flux’ (2010: 8). While I do not fully share in Ingold’s anxiety over the object (2010: 3), his emphasis of change (2010: 7) in contrast to stasis seems particularly useful when considering the examples of public durational knitting1 discussed in this chapter. In an attempt to contribute to an understanding of the current identity of The Knitting Map, this chapter considers a number of knitting projects over the past decade that share either in a commitment to create knitting in a public setting or to create knitted fabric with multiple hands. Contemporary artistic practice is, of course, not the only place where shared knitting can be found. Long before the advent of machine knitting in the round, Korsnäs sweaters,2 made in western Finland, required three women to work with knit and crochet simultaneously on a single sweater. The technique requires the knitters to sit in extremely close proximity for the entire project – a reality that has been modestly described as requiring ‘good interpersonal skills’ (Esselström 2016). 77

At the opposite extreme, knitting also occupies central roles in performances ranging from film to theatre. The central character of the Japanese film WOOL 100% (2006), directed by Mai Tominaga, creates ‘conspicuously troubled knitting’ (Corkhill, Hemmings, Maddock and Riley 2014: 43) by unravelling and reknitting her red cocoon-like garment throughout the film. Knitting Peace (2013) by Cirkus Cirkör from Sweden3 – a circus group who incorporate knitting and thread into their contemporary performance – credit the performers with various contributions including: ‘handstand, live knitting’, ‘knitted live music’ and ‘knots and tangles’ (Cirkus Cirkör 2013). Comparisons are, of course, never identical. Many of the projects selected for discussion in this chapter are considerably smaller than The Knitting Map; others have now existed over a far longer duration. But the activity of making, or as Ingold may say the ‘processes of formation’ (2010: 2–3), often emerges in the following examples as the primary objective. Textiles and a general level of knowledge shared by the public about textile techniques have made them useful components of participatory art strategies. Even weaving (which is more practically encumbered by the need for a loom) has been adapted by artists such as American Travis Meinolf to allow for public participation in making (Hemmings 2012). The Taiwanese American artist Lee Mingwei consistently includes participation from the audience with invitations to eat, sleep and write letters used in his projects. The 2016–2017 exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Ta¯maki, Lee Mingwei and His Relations: The Art of Participation, included a video interview in which he reflects on the moment textile repair took seed in his artistic work. He recounts a compulsive drive to mend clothing in his home, which he experienced immediately after the 9/11 attacks in New York City. (The attacks left the artist and his partner physically unharmed, but only because his partner was running late for his job in the Twin Towers on the morning of September 11.) Mingwei describes the evening of the attacks when he found himself ‘mending clothing [I] always wanted to mend but did not have the time. Eight years after 9/11 I realized I could do mending not only for myself but for strangers’ (2014). Subsequently, Mingwei has invited the public to bring objects and clothing in need of repair, which he and his assistants then stitch in public. The “repaired” objects remain on public display for the duration of the exhibition. But repair is an inaccurate term for many of these stitches, which include decorative flourishes and tangled bundles of yarn – far more symbolic than practical in execution. Mingwei explains: The act of mending took on emotional value as well, depending on how personal the damaged item was, e.g., a favorite shirt vs. an old but little-used tablecloth. This emotional mending was marked by the use of thread which was not the color of the fabric around it, and often colorfully at odds with that fabric, as though to commemorate the repair. Unlike a tailor, who will try to hide the fact that the fabric was once damaged, my mending was done with the idea of celebrating the repair. (2017) The artist suggests that these gestures exemplify a connection that underpins his entire practice:

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Connection with community really goes back deeper, even before 9/11 to when I was a weaver at CCA [California College of Arts]. I truly believe that all of my projects, especially this one [Mending Project], are a conceptual weaving of a sort of the warp and weft of human psychology, social relationships and memories together. (2014) It is here, in the social aspects of Mingwei’s project, that comparisons to The Knitting Map may be most fruitful, as Gilson reflects: Poetically and politically it was a work that sought to rework the urban territory of matter and meaning: knitting was used as something monumental – an abstract cartography of Cork generated by the city itself and its weather, and knitted every day for a year. To make such a gesture using feminine and female labour aspired to re-work the relationship between femininity and power in an Irish context: it gave cartographic authority to working-class older women from Cork, for a year. (2012: 11) In Mingwei’s practice (and shared by The Knitting Map), the practical function of mending (or knitting) is subservient to the conversation offered by the artist and fostered through his artistic strategy. His invitation arguably may inspire me to dig out that piece of clothing that has needed repair for longer than I care to admit, but the decorative, essentially nonfunctional, flourishes that he (or his assistants) contribute in the gallery and the display of these “repairs” make clear that physical mending may be the most minor goal of the project. Prioritising social connections over practical material making is noted by Kate Adey in her PhD research of knitting clubs in Edinburgh, Scotland. Adey’s extensive interviews include examples of participants who confirm their enjoyment and enthusiasm for meeting to knit in public, but confess to undoing the material they produce during these social gatherings when they get home out of a desire to execute the highest quality work their solitary concentration can allow. Adey recounts: They choose which projects to bring to the group carefully as they did not want to bring a project which required intense concentration which meant they would ‘miss out on the gossip’. Members talked about getting home and realising they had made mistakes that needed to be unpicked because they had been distracted by conversation during the group . . . It presents an interesting situation that women should choose to knit together despite the potential that this will hamper their knitting. (2015: 155) Adey’s research suggests that a desire for companionship while knitting complex patterns can, at least at times, be antithetical. I can talk, and I can knit. I want to talk to others; I also want to and can knit complex patterns. While both are desired, they cannot always occupy the same moment. In fact, the practical question of material function troubles many knitting projects. (By material function I acknowledge that symbolic meaning can exist without a textile

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being particularly well made, able to withstand use or with an example such as The Knitting Map, exist in a scale that an individual, alone, can control.) But it may be useful to consider The Knitting Map alongside examples of knitting that appear in the context of performance because it is here that the emphasis on knitting as a verb rather than a noun becomes ever more pronounced. In some durational knitting performances, such as the examples by Ana María Hernando, the action of knitting does not even result in the production of any knitted cloth. And as the final examples discussed in this chapter of performances by Alya Hessy and Zsuzsanna Szabó will show, public durational knitting can also include intentional deconstruction as an aspect of the performance. In our materially gorged world, perhaps it is useful to release the purpose of knitting from an obligation to produce a concrete material outcome and allow space for knitting as a gesture and the meaning of un-knitting as an example of Ingold’s EWO (2010:8). While the production of The Knitting Map has not been described as a performance, it is clearly credited as an action that “gave cartographic authority to working-class older women from Cork, for a year” (Gilson 2012: 11). Gilson’s sense of knitting as an entry point to map or model for activities that go past the immediate production of cloth is not isolated. The American artist Sabrina Gschwandtner, for example, sees knitting as a tool that extends beyond a structure for creating cloth from a single thread to instead suggest that knitting provides her with a model through which she approaches a variety of creative tasks: When I am asked what I do I often reply that I’m an artist who works with film, video and textiles. To me the link between the three is instinctive and implicit – media is a textile – and my work expresses why and how I find that to be true. The model for my career as an artist, curator, writer, editor and publisher is knitting. (2008: 271) If we accept the purpose of knitting can, as Gschwandtner observes, exist in its breadth, then the material result of knitting may diminish in importance. The cloth, knitting as a noun, isn’t always the point. Sometimes it is knitting as a verb – as action and even gesture – that is the point.

One maker: Celia Pym Title: Blue Knitting Duration: nine months London-based artist Celia Pym created Blue Knitting during a nine-month solo journey through Japan in 2001. The work has been exhibited with notebooks from Pym’s journey to help contextualise the making, but she acknowledges that an exhibition strategy was not something considered during production. Pym reflects, The work of knitting every day for nine months in a country I had never been to and with very little language skills was a way of making a journey, observing Textiles, Community and Controversy    80

Figure 6.1  Celia Pym, Blue Knitting (Detail), 2001. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 6.2  Celia Pym, Blue Knitting, 2001, Tokyo. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 6.3  Celia Pym, Blue Knitting, 2001. Image courtesy of the artist.

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the new place and slowly measuring time. That was the project. Having this large piece of knitting at the end of it was important. (2015) Pym travelled light and set herself just one rule – the use of blue yarn for her daily work on a single piece of knitting that accompanied her throughout the duration of her travels. When the ball of wool she was knitting with ran out, Pym took this as her cue to move on to her next destination. ‘The pace of the journey was determined by the speed of my knitting’, she explains. (2015) The fabric is consistently fifty stitches wide, but variations in width were created through changes in needle size. Yarn was bought as well as donated by the public when Pym knit in spaces such as shopping malls, as well as evenings in her shared hostel room. As the knitting grew beyond the length of a recognizable scarf, public understanding of the project became easier to communicate, despite the language barrier. Knitting provided companionship for the solo traveller and, Pym reflects, became a ‘way to describe myself – I got positive responses to deflect questions of being alone’ (2015). (The nine-month time frame holds no particular symbolic meaning beyond the practicalities of her funding during one ‘academic incubation’ period from September to May.) Nearing its final length of eighty feet, the project eventually took up all the space in her travel bag. Blue Knitting now lives in mothproof box in the artist’s London studio.

Two makers: Angela Maddock Title: Bloodline Duration: twelve years (ongoing) British artist Angela Maddock has knit Bloodline during regular visits with her mother that now span more than a decade. A seam marks the starting point of garter stitches initially made in claustrophobic proximity to each other. The blood red yarns used in the project came from a Scottish woollen mill, selected intentionally for its connection to the artist’s Scottish father and an unresolved desire for dialogue about this topic with her mother. Maddock refers to knitting as ‘a metaphor for staying connected that enables us to talk about past inheritance; a way of reflecting on attachment, proximity, smothering’ (2015). Over time Maddock noticed she had unintentionally dropped a stitch; its uncorrected absence now symbolising the violent death of her brother when a young man. Maddock acknowledges that the project can be understood as a type of ‘anticipatory grief’ noted by Darian Leader in his book The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression. But she also observes that the project is ‘never left on its own’ (2015). While Bloodline also exists in photographs, it remains viable to carry in a bag. Accompanying the artist on her journeys, the project can be read as a reassuring reminder of a continuity and bond. Bloodline is kept in a mothproof bag at the bottom of the artist’s wardrobe.

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Figures 6.4 and 6.5  Angela Maddock, Bloodline, 2005–ongoing, wool, knit. Images courtesy of the artist.

Two makers: Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger Title: Untitled (Pink Tube) Duration: twelve years (ongoing) Over the past twelve years American artists Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger have crocheted4 Untitled (Pink Tube), always working together and in public. The crocheted work has a distinct centre starting point and, over time, variations of pink acrylic yarn have intentionally been bought for the project. The couple recognise that some of the associations we have with the colour – such as breast cancer awareness – did not exist when the project started. Today, over a decade of public performances mean the work is soiled, particularly near the centre where it has spent the most time on the ground. Miller and Shellabarger describe the work as a ‘physical manifestation and metaphor of our relationship’ (2015). Early in the project the pink crochet tube looked phallic, with time and growth the physical references have shifted to something umbilical or intestinal and now even comic. The couple reflect that living openly as a gay couple was ‘more problematic ten years ago’ (2015) but express frustration that the 2015 legalisation of same-sex marriage across the entire United States is progress, but does not erase homophobia overnight. The public rather than private construction of the work is crucial to its meaning. One tube twists clockwise, the other counter-clockwise, making the two sides ‘very different – our tension, our difference’ (2015), the couple explain. Their public making rule means that they face regular interruptions, but have ‘no interest in going back. Mistakes don’t matter’ (2015). Even a red wine stain from an exhibition opening remains.

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Figure 6.6  Miller and Shellabarger, Untitled (Pink Tube), 2005–ongoing, acrylic, yarn, crochet. MCA Chicago. Image ­courtesy of the artists.

When there is an opportunity for public exhibition the couple add to the piece. Between public performances the crochet is displayed with photographs that document the nature of its making. At other times they simply take the work into a public setting such as a park or coffee shop and crochet. Transport is a new challenge. Where they once could pop the project in a bag, size now requires that Untitled (Pink Tube) travels by taxi. The ongoing work currently resides with the artists. But, in what could be read as the ultimate resolution of Ingold’s EWO, Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger have agreed that when half of the couple passes away, the other person will begin to unravel Untitled (Pink Tube) in public. This work must commence within one year of the date of death.

Two makers: Andrea Vander Kooij and Alan Groombridge Title: Tension Duration: two months In 2000, the Dutch-Canadian artist Andrea Vander Kooij knit a sweater in collaboration with Alan Groombridge, the man who is today her husband. Vander Kooij explains that in previous artistic collaborations with her then-fiancé she was aware of her deference to what she perceived to be his greater technical skill. Looking to address this power

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dynamic, she proposed a project that required them to construct jointly. In Tension, Vander Kooij appropriates an androgynous garment shape in an unassuming beige yarn. Coloured pattern and technical flourishes are absent. Instead, the couple set about constructing a plain sweater – arguably wearable by either artist. Each knit half with the moment of handover split down the front centre panel, rather than tucked away in a discrete side seam. The result is functional, but a little lopsided. Sitting side by side to knit, Groombridge’s inexperienced knitting is visible in his overly tight stitches and unequal tension. Rather than droop, the sweater seems to shrink, one shoulder hiked and tucked in tension. Vander Kooij explains that the project took place while the couple were planning their own wedding, a time of unity and preparation for the formal vows of marriage, but inevitably also a phase of intense Figure 6.7  Andrea Vander Kooij and Alan Groombridge, negotiation and, at times, emotional tension. Tension, 2000. Image courtesy of the artists. While the differences in knitting are more pronounced than initially expected, the project set out to create a functional garment and any errors in knitting were corrected during production. Tension is now stored in the private collection of the artist.

93 + 52 + 38 makers: Kate Just Titles: KNIT HOPE (UK), KNIT SAFE (Melbourne) and Big Knitted Welcome Mat Duration: three months + two months + one month Across 2013–2014, American-born Australian artist Kate Just worked on three community knitting projects that were produced in public settings such as libraries and galleries in collaboration with volunteers. KNIT HOPE (UK) took place in 2013 with individuals and knitting groups across the UK to produce a large-scale banner knit with the word “hope” in fluorescent yellow bricklayer’s yarn and silver reflective thread. The companion work, KNIT

Figure 6.8  Kate Just, HOPE & SAFE, 2014, Exhibition at Daine Singer Gallery, Melbourne, knitted bricklayer’s yarn and retro-reflective silver thread, aluminium, paint, 25 x 280 x 25cm. Collection City of Wangaratta. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 6.9  Kate Just, HOPE BANNER (Detail), 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 6.10  Kate Just, Hope Walk Leeds, 2013, type C digital print, 170 × 120 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

SAFE (Melbourne) was produced on the artist’s return to her home city and uses black bricklayer’s yarn and silver reflective thread. Both projects are a response to violence against women and an effort to reclaim public places for women. Juliette Peers’ observation that the banners’ ‘chosen material reiterates the strong civic and public intention of the works’ (2014: n.  p.) could also be seen as Ingold’s EWO – in particular his emphasis on change (2010: 7). After their community production, the banners in the UK and Melbourne took to the city streets on a number of walks that included volunteer knitters. When exhibited, the textiles have been displayed with candid photographs of the artist and others marching, often at night, in both Britain and Australia with the reflective banners. Following these pieces, the Big Knitted Welcome Mat was made of knit and crocheted squares produced by volunteers over the span of a month in the city of Dandenong’s Civic Centre in recognition of the city’s ongoing designation as a Refugee Welcome Zone. KNIT HOPE (UK) and KNIT SAFE (Melbourne) Figure 6.11  Kate Just, Big Knitted Welcome are in the Wangaratta City Art Gallery collection, known for its contemporary Mat, 2014, cotton, knit, textile art works. Big Knitted Welcome Mat is owned by the City of Dandenong 300 × 150 cm. Image and hangs in the Dandenong Library. (Just 2017) courtesy of the artist.

60+ makers: Liz Collins 60+ makers: Liz Collins’ Knitting Nation Phase 1: Knitting During Wartime (2005) Knitting Nation Phase 2: Atelier (2006) Knitting Nation Phase 3: The Strip Game (2006) Knitting Nation Phase 4: Pride (2008) Knitting Nation Phase 5: Architectural Embellishment (2008) Knitting Nation Phase 6: Mapping (2011) Knitting Nation Phase 7: Darkness Descends (2011) Knitting Nation Phase 8: Under Construction (2011) Textiles, Community and Controversy    86

Figure 6.12  Liz Collins, Knitting Nation Phase 7: Darkness Descends, 2011. Image courtesy of the artist. Photographer Scott Rudd.

Knitting Nation Phase 9: Accumulation (2012) Knitting Nation Phase 10: Domestic Swarming (2012) Knitting Nation Phase 11: Stripped Bare (2013) Knitting Nation Phase 12: H20 (2013) Knitting Nation Phase 13: Weaving Factory (2015) Knitting Nation Phase 14: The Heart of the Matter (2015) Duration: twelve years (ongoing)

Figure 6.13  Liz Collins, Knitting Nation Phase 13: Weaving Factory, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist. Photographer Scott Rudd.

American artist and designer Liz Collins has conceived fourteen and counting Knitting Nation performances. Each iteration brings together a team that machine knits large volumes of cloth in a public setting. Making visible the often invisible labour behind textile production is a constant theme of the project. Alongside this ongoing theme, various phases of the project have taken up particular foci. For example, Phase 1 drew on Collins’ frustration at US involvement in Iraq; Phase 4 created a giant version of the rainbow pride flag; Phase 6 explored machine knit cloth as a form of drawing; Phase 8 is described by Collins as “netherworld factory and construction site; part Dr. Seuss and part Willy Wonka” (2015). Seven years of cloth produced during Knitting Nation Phases 1–8 became the content for Knitting Nation Phase 9: Accumulation (2012). When de-installed, Knitting Nation Phases 1–9 were then stored by the artist in garbage bags in

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Figure 6.14  Liz Collins, Knitting Nation Phase 13: Weaving Factory, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist. Photographer Scott Rudd.

her Providence, Rhode Island studio and later her New York studio. Collins then determined that future iterations would need to make use of the cloth produced during the performance. The machine knit cloth produced in Knitting Nation Phase 10 was braided directly into rugs made on site during the course of the performance at the Museum of Modern Art Studio in New York City. The whereabouts of Knitting Nation Phase 11 and Phase 12 are unknown; the material stayed in Zagreb and California, respectively. Knitting Nation Phase 13 wove much of the material of previous Knitting Nation performances in the artist’s possession into three rugs. Knitting Nation Phase 14 recycled sweaters donated by the American knitwear brand Eileen Fisher. Very little Knitting Nation fabric now remains. The exceptions are two flag projects: Knitting Nation Phase 1 (the red, white and blue American flag) and Knitting Nation Phase 4 (the rainbow pride flag).

One maker and two John Deere excavators: Dave Cole Title: The Knitting Machine (2005) at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) Duration: Fourth of July weekend

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Figure 6.15  Dave Cole, The Knitting Machine, 2005. Image courtesy of the artist.

American artist Dave Cole’s The Knitting Machine was installed in the courtyard of MASS MoCA over a holiday weekend. Video documentation of the project records ‘aluminum utility poles attached to John Deere excavators to “knit” a giant American flag out of acrylic felt’ (2005). The United States flag received a pragmatic simplification: where fifty white stars representing each state in the Union usually appear on a dark blue background, Cole knit a single block of blue on a field of red and white stripes. Cole explains of the project’s construction: [we] technically knit all the stitches of the flag with the needles on the machines – the manipulation of the yarn by me with the hook was simply the ‘flipping’ of the yarn (wrapping it from the back to the front) that happens with the smallest finger when knitting continental style. The stitches were pulled through each other with the needles themselves at my direction to the operators with hand signals. It was and is actually quite important to me and to the piece that all 500 stitches were actually knit with the machines. (2017)

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The first iteration of the work was performed at Providence, Rhode Island’s 2002 Convergence Arts Festival, but it is the video record of the MASS MoCA performance filmed by Jack Criddle that has enjoyed 47,000 Vimeo views (Cole 2005). The work no longer exists.

Two performers: Knitting Ballet Title: Knitting Ballet. Directed and choreographed by Ana María Hernando and performed by Deb Sclar and Brian Dunn Duration: Knitting Ballet version 1, Art Museum, University of Colorado Boulder, was performed for 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Knitting Ballet version 2 was performed for two afternoons for 3 minutes and 30 seconds, six to seven times at different City of Boulder, Colorado bus stops for a total time of three hours each performance day. ‘My work is about the loss of quiet crafts, like losing languages. It is political because it is domestic’ (2016), explains the Argentinian American artist Ana María Hernando. The artist has long worked with communities of cloistered nuns in Argentina and Andean weavers and farmers in Peru to stitch components of her large-scale installations, while providing these communities with much needed employment. In her recent Knitting Ballet (2016), Hernando directed and choreographed two tango dancers, Deb Sclar and Brian Dunn, who performed with knitting, first in the Colorado University Art Museum at Boulder as part of Hernando’s We Have Flowers exhibition (24 June through 22 October 2016), and then at bus stops throughout the city as part of the City of Boulder’s Experiments in Public Art. Photographs and video act as records of the performances.5 Moving from bus stop to bus stop through the city was a desire to remind people of the many moments in life where we drift, not particularly present anywhere. ‘I want to awaken people to the awareness of silent moments, many times we are not present on the bus, in an elevator, or with each other’ (Hernando 2016). Hernando is clear that in these performances ‘knitting [is] at the service of performance and dancing’ (2016). The

Figures 6.16, 6.17, and 6.18  Ana María Hernando, A Knitting Ballet (Details).

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red knitted fabric was prepared in advance and few stitches actually made it onto the needles during the performance. Instead Hernando draws together what she describes as the staccato arm movements of knitting with those of tango. ‘Conversations are a way of knitting’, Hernando reflects, and ‘tango is knitting bodies together’ (2016). The two pieces of red knitting used in A Knitting Ballet (2016) are stored together in a grey box held at the artist’s Boulder, Colorado studio until their next performance date is confirmed.

Two performers: Alya Hessy Title: Over and Under Duration: two days If Hernando sees the movement of tango as a way of knitting together bodies, the Ukrainian-born Dutch artist Alya Hessy takes this one step further by turning pairs of bodies into knitting needles. In her Over and Under performances held at venues such as the Fries Museum (21–22 November 2015) and VanAbbe (16 April 2016) in the Netherlands, Hessy performs what she has coined ‘body knitting’ alongside a male dancer. The performance literally creates a knitted structure, looped from one body/needle to the next, back and forth in a mesmerising action. Hessy explains: the work explores knitting as a concept, whereby this heritage craft becomes a model of human relationships. Two entities, working together, create a material. Two human bodies start moving to become knitting needles, the choreography of knitting unfolds into space and materialises into a story of two people collaborating. (2017) Figure 6.19  Alya Hessy, Over and Under, 2016. Photographer team Peter Stigter. Image courtesy of the artist.

In the performances to date, Hessy has left the knitting from day

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one intact and picked up the stitches again – sometimes with understandable difficulty – on day two. The knitting is then taken apart and the thick wool yarn used in subsequent performances. She explains that ‘the action is the work; the piece that you make is the result, but it [alone] does not have special value’ (Hessy 2016). In other performances, Hessy has also knit with her own body, slipping thick red thread from one arm to the other to create long chains of knit that draw a dynamic line down multistory walls in various museum settings. The artist carries her giant cache of yarn in an oversized bag around her own neck that touches her feet: noose and medallion at one and the same time. Here too the material is un-knit at the end of each performance and reused in future performances.

Two performers: Zsuzsanna Szabó’s Transition Title: Transition. Performed with dancer Csilla Nagy of Cipolla Collectiva Duration: Four one-hour cycles of knitting, unknitting and reknitting for a total performance time of four hours In contrast to the hand-knitting performance choreographed by Ana María Hernando or the body knitting of Alya Hessy, the Hungarian artist Zsuzsanna Szabó uses, like Liz Collins, machine knitting in her performance work. Szabó explains the performance Transition: the point of knitting is to change the status and the consistency of the material, the yarn. Materials have a memory, like human beings, but in a very visual way. So I wanted to create a performance, which can show us this memory. I wanted to show all the “life” of a piece of new yarn. (2016) Szabó’s interest in the energy and memory rather than the material object of knitting may be the most explicit example of Ingold’s EWO (2010: 6) introduced in this chapter. Here the imprint of the action of knitting is the stated priority. The work exists in a cycle, rather than moving along an assumed trajectory that ends with the completion of physical object. ‘The person who works on the material, creates a skin around the body, tears it down, and start[s] the work again’ (Szabó 2017). Transition seeks to exhaust the material capacity of knitting by performing in a cycle that builds and then unravels a cocoon around the body: Repeating this process was also important, because knitting itself is a ­repetitive action. As I was focusing [on] the phenomenon of knitting, it wasn’t a problem that I would not have a “final piece”. But it was important to unravel it always [. . .] This is why I was repeatedly making and unmaking it, until it arrived to its end, when it became so damaged that I couldn’t use it anymore. (Szabó 2016)

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Figure 6.20  Zsuzsanna Szabo, Transition, 2016. Photographer Eniko ´´ Hodosy. Image courtesy of the artist.

Szabó’s approach uses and reuses thread until knitting (a verb, an action) exhausts knitting (a noun, an object). The materials used in the performance no longer exist. And that leads us back to the question of what indeed becomes of knitting after making. Public durational knitting after making is varied. Unquestionably, projects that involve the hands of one or two makers face far simpler negotiations about their future whereabouts than projects made by many. Photography, video and journals are used by some to help exhibition visitors see knitting as an action. These decisions confirm that the knitted object is not – alone – entirely the point. From January of 2006 The Knitting Map was stored in the Cork City Council Arts Office Store. During 2007–2008 it travelled across the Atlantic to Pennsylvania for exhibition and then returned to storage in the University College Cork’s library store (a warehouse in the city’s suburbs). After the 2015 exhibition at The Glucksman, The Knitting Map went into private storage. Conversations continue about its future permanent home. Should The Knitting Map be considered an object or an action? The project that perhaps most closely resembles it, Kate Just’s Big Knitted Welcome Mat, now hangs in a community library. But mothproof storage, recycling into further projects and deconstruction by way of unravelling exemplify other strategies in use. This suggests, as Ingold celebrates, that in many public or community knitting projects production is of equal, if not greater, importance than the physical outcome. Adey’s research into

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knitting groups in Edinburgh highlights that some knitters are willing to reknit what they produce during their knitting groups in an effort to preserve material quality while enjoying the social benefits of the group (2015: 155). In performances, such as Hernando’s Knitting Ballets, production takes on a secondary role to the gesture of knitting. (Liz Collins’ ongoing Knitting Nation series offers one counter-example of this, with Collins more recently devoting considerable attention to the reuse of material knitted during her performances.) Ingold emphasises the creative relationship between art and life, which I sense the majority of practitioners know and feel: The artist – as also the artisan – is an itinerant, and his [or her] work is consubstantial with the trajectory of his or her own life. Moreover the creativity of the work lies in the forward movement that gives rise to things. To read things “forwards” entails a focus not on abduction but on improvisation. (Ingold and Hallam 2007: 3, quoted in Ingold 2010: 10) Knitting, of course, proceeds by pattern rather than sheer improvisation. But if we think past knitting as a noun to instead focus on knitting as a verb, then forward movement and an acceptance of improvisation strike me as fundamental contributions. Knitting can be understood as ‘a model of human relationships’ (Hessy 2017) or even ‘the model for my career as an artist, curator, writer, editor and publisher’ (Gschwandtner 2008). Knitting is a verb (always) resulting in a noun (sometimes).

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7

Textures of performance Rethinking The Knitting Map Róisín O’Gorman

Prologue It is not a map of knitting or a knitted map – it is a map that knits. The map knits together people from twenty-two countries in a patterning of the mundane complexity of everyday journeys and weather from a small southern Irish town. Can you see this project enticing the expert knitters and drawing in the novices – entangling the virtuosic with the playful? Through their fingers they conjured her, this dancing queen with a thousand pointy spikes at the ready, puncturing the patriarchal prosthesis of map-making, can you see it? As they conjured her, she in turn wove them into an arts practice, wired them into a community who spent a year passing threads between their fingers. To map is always to imagine; to map is to plot and chart your own territory; who is sovereign? What are the legends here? Between them – the queen and her subjects – they wove the weather back into the wool, wiring stitches to the elements (putting us in mind of the performance and endurance of the sheep). Can you imagine a map that dances in a digitally coded tangle of wool and weather? Can you see the moving force of all those digits dancing for a year? Can you see the traces of movement in the spill and flow of the acres of wool winding from digital code into patterns in time? (The President of Ireland did.) This is not a map of arrival and conquest; and this is not a definitive interpretation. How can you code or map a year? How can traditional knitting patterns isomorphically saturate digital computer code from 95

traffic movement and weather patterns? How can this map memorise and memorialise all that traipsed and trespassed in this damp city in that blink of an eye? How many needles? How many hands and digits? How many balls of wool? How many yards or miles of cabling from CCTV to a crypt which encrypted codes in wires humming beneath the feet of those who just knitted for a year? It took years but she pulsed into life and lives; she reached out and travelled to North America and now lies quietly back in Cork again awaiting the next performance . . . The italic sections add a texture to a mostly academic text, a small register that points beyond the limits of any academic endeavour to stabilise meaning or to guarantee knowledges.

Figure 7.1  The Knitting Map: swish of colour. Photograph by Róisín O’Gorman.

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T

he Knitting Map project materialised a development of the half/angel performance company’s practices from a decade of weaving bodies, writing, voice and technologies together to generate transdisciplinary and innovative performances.1 The Knitting Map caused a stir around its funding and function, with further tropes in the local news media reporting on the disappearance of the map. The idea that a map itself might be lost was somehow too appealing when the project was dismissed by some as a lost cause and a waste of money.2 This so-called controversy framed the remounting/staging of The Knitting Map in The Glucksman in Cork in 2015 (O’Connor 2015). The controversy, however, overshadows aspects of this work, both object and subject, its appearance and disappearance, that offer other possibilities for perceiving and interpreting its performance. This chapter approaches the project from a performance-based framework infused with feminist materialist sensibility. The central move here is to remap The Knitting Map as a performative feminist durational arts practice. Much as we are left with a largescale art object that can be installed in a gallery, it also flickers beyond this status as static object. Seen as a vibrant performative tracing of lived digital dancing from 2005, when Cork itself was choreographed within European frameworks as a Capital of Culture, the map marks an outline of the bodies that wandered through the city that year and a movement score through the city that can be continually encountered or reimagined. That is, The Knitting Map is also a dance score for the thousands of digits that wove a city for a year. As a score we see the repetitions and patterns as moves and performances which trouble the archive by the ways in which we remember (and forget) through bodily practices. On a basic level The Knitting Map can be seen as an archive of a particular year, as a fixed object, a stabilising map of relations of power made visible through the framing of a controversy in the exhibition. However, this chapter elaborates how this positioning misses and dismisses a significant element in the creation and possibility in perceiving with and through this map. It is a map that knits. That is, this archive is full of holes; it is made of holes in fact. Those holes require attendance to the demands of performance modes – to an understanding of the paradoxes of disappearance and traces, of what moves and what remains in the landscape of understanding, in the terrain of what is perceived as valuable. Repositioning this map as a performative score, or to take it further, a score of a performative texture, allows it to move within terrains and theories of art-practices, feminisms, materialism and cyborgs. In this way, this essay draws another legend from and for the map and offers a scratchy sensibility that refuses a smooth surface of coherence. It allows for complexity to cohabit within the ambiguities of interpretation in each iteration or (re)embodiment. Which way is North? Which way do you hold it? It is not neat and tidy. It is a bit itchy. Some stitches may be dropped, but we’ll pick them up again and purl around the back. Following the performative threads within the weave of the project repositions the terrain so that we can ask: what does this map do, what does it enact as a durational arts practice and choreography? If we see it as a remainder of a year-long performance by thousands of digits – both fleshy and computational – passing through

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Figure 7.2  The Knitting Map, edge reflection. The Glucksman, 2015. Photograph by Róisín O’Gorman.

Cork, how might we talk with this cyborgian ghost, this interloper who appeared again in The Glucksman in Cork 2015?

Performative frameworks Textures and Things: “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?” (Shakespeare, Hamlet 1:1:19)3 It is hard to deny the ‘thingness’ of the 65 by 20 metre object which was displayed most recently in The Glucksman exhibition in Cork in 2015. Installed cascading from the gallery’s high ceiling, the work flooded across the impressive open floor of the gallery, rippled and tumbled in waves right up to the windows, echoing the flowing river outside the gallery, evoking the movement which made it.4 And yet, what is this thing? What happens if we look at the threads as traces, as outlines of digits and dancing? What happens when the traces then in turn become threads? If we begin to see this piece as a trace and outline of a performance, is this thing akin to a dramatic text or choreographic Textiles, Community and Controversy    98

score, an outline of a performance open to reiterations?5 The materiality and movement of this ‘thing’ opens up the linkage between trace, thread and text following Tim Ingold’s ecological anthropological approach to lines and making, where he draws rich intercultural examples together to understand the movement across use and perception that tactility and the dexterity of human hands allow and invent.6 Ingold also reminds us of the history of the development of text from the patterns of weaving, which we no longer see when words move across a page or now even a screen.7 Geographers Paul C. Adams, Steven Hoelscher and Karen E. Till also remind us of the performative interweaving of the tactile, the text and interpretative context that creates a sense of texture encompassing both the textile and the feel of the weave. They then add: But it also refers to a “weave” of an organized arrangement of words or other intangible things (context). A textile is created by bringing together many threads and, as such, represents ordered complexity. Language, too, is ordered complexity, and when we understand a word by its context we are discerning a pattern and filling in a gap, sewing together what is torn, extracting meaning not only from what is said but from the relationships this act of saying sets up with other statements, conditions, events, and situations. (2001: xiii) This attention to the materiality of language, to the lived conditions of its ‘ordered complexity’ can help us to extend our understanding of The Knitting Map beyond a ‘reading’ of the piece as a simple translation of movement and weather into digital code and in turn into knitted codes. Text is always a tissue of textures and a threading of gaps to make meaning. This is to see The Knitting Map then as vibrant complexity, as a thing and as more than a thing, a lively texture of organised complexity, a language of movement, of hands weaving experience into this thing, this figure, which is discernible through its contexts as a shimmering performative texture. This oscillation destabilises mapping itself, reminding us of the treachery of any map, whereby any ordering of complexity makes choices about what is foregrounded and what gets lost. I first met The Knitting Map in the old city morgue which had been converted to an arts storage space. We knew the map was there but rumours were building again that it was lost. We went to look, to be reassured that all was well. One room still had a very intact white ceramic body-shaped ‘Royal Daulton’-labelled slab with a drain for bodies’ fluids. In the next room we searched around the semi-dark. “Shh! Don’t tell anyone I’m here. I’m sleeping.” She rolled back up again, waiting . . . We left, chilled by encounter and possibility.

What performance maps Maps render what matters into visibility. In this way we can begin to think through mapping as a performative act. Maps are not innocent markers of geography but integral players in the process of controlling and occupying space. Performance maps another sensibility asking us to pay attention to what moves, to what is ephemeral and to what is Chapter 7  Textures of performance: Rethinking The Knitting Map   99

present. In response to a traditional scholarship that sought the naturalised performance in the playtext, feminist and performance studies scholar Peggy Phelan argues that the mode of performance requires another kind of looking whereby the performance that is past is not available, but that we can look for the outline left by performance (see Mourning Sex 1997: 3). Phelan’s project draws attention to the trace rather than trying to render a rational model that claims an exclusive representation of all that has gone before it and all that is to come. That is, she throws suspicion on modes of representation that claim comprehensive wholeness. However, even though a representative model is flawed, this does not mean that it is defunct, but that it needs to allow for the shadows and holes, the ephemerality of affect and experience and the dark sites of loss and trauma.8 Phelan argues that performance offers this resistance within its representational frames. To attend to a feminist performance-based sensibility in theoretical frameworks as well as in arts practices is to become attentive to the marginal spaces, to the intermingling of selves and communities, of place and perception. Meaning is knitted texture, that is, it is created with holes rather than wholes. Considering the performative textures of The Knitting Map then also repositions the terrain of this mapping practice. This essay will knit through a range of ideas to reconsider the possibilities for mapping and perception that this project offers. The first section deals with a reframing of mapping in arts practices through a reimagining of cartographic sensibility. The next section stretches this theoretically further towards the perceptual demands of movement that The Knitting Map encompasses and which have been (mostly) critically overlooked. The final section considers the legacy of movement, or rather resistance to movement,

Figure 7.3  The Knitting Map: holes and traces. Photograph by Róisín O’Gorman.

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within the particular performance context of The Knitting Map and briefly knits the figure of the cyborg into the weave. Drawing these critical approaches together shows how The Knitting Map contributes to a broader understanding of making meaning through performance and interweaves perceptions of stability as mappings of movement, of relational yet situated epistemologies, (re)wiring our perceptions for further scores and dancing possibilities of the city on the move.

Section 1: Earth-body mapping: Withness Interrogating the stabilising practices of standard cartography is an ongoing project of Earth Art artists. In Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape, Edward S. Casey offers four distinct ways of mapping that are useful to consider: “mapping of, mapping for, mapping with/in, and mapping out” (2005: xx). Mapping of and for are very public enterprises concerning “the major science of cartography and the practical science of orientation, respectively” (2005: xxii). This gives us our everyday sense of the map: you are here – and how do I get there. However, the problem is when the map is the known world and the other registers of how we live are erased because they are not articulated or understood as communicable, mappable or of lasting value. Mapping with/in contrasts the proceeding two in that they are indicative but the “map with/in proceeds by adumbration rather than by indication: by indefinite indirection rather than by definite direction” (2005: xxi). The focus of mapping here as Casey says “is one’s experience of such locales. Such mapping concerns the way one experiences certain parts of the known world: the issue is no longer how to get there or just where ‘there’ is in world-space, but how it feels to be there, with/in that very place or region” (2005: xxi). The final mapping he delineates is “mapping out”, which defines the relationship between the mapmaker and the earth; here “boundaries that become strict borders in the case of the official cartographer, who is a representative of a ‘major science’—are porous when I bodily feel a given landscape. I am of it, and it of me: in a subjective genitive sense of of that means belonging to” (xxi). In this argument Casey shifts the experience of “witness” from a voyeuristic optical observance outside the direct experience of an event and implicates the observer as a participant who encounters the event or place within their own bodily felt comprehension. We see the many ways in which The Knitting Map operated as a cartography of withness, which actively threads a community, rather than the witness or objective observer positioned outside the territory. Artists have long understood the limits of the first two categories here, and the dominance of the science of cartography has had its challengers from the art world, overtly articulated by poet Eavan Boland in “That the Science of Cartography is Limited”. She recounts her journey to the West of Ireland, once a vastly more populated landscape, where she looks through the ivy and grass growing over a line of a road no longer visible to see the traces of a famine road. She tells us how the Relief Committees set up projects for the starving to build hopeless roads in 1847, but we know the futility of such schemes in the face of the monumental disaster of the Great Famine in Irish history. She continues:

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Where they died, there the road ended and ends still and when I take down the map of this island, it is never so I can say here is the masterful, the apt rendering of the spherical as flat, nor an ingenious design which persuades a curve into a plane, but to tell myself again that the line which says woodland and cries hunger and gives out among sweet pine and cypress, and finds no horizon will not be there (1994:16–28, 7–8) The landscape and those who died there cry out through the poem and demand a different form of witnessing – not a so-called objective or statistical detail, not the governmental and rational scheme, which bears responsibility for the situation, but the visceral account of the poet’s own experience of the landscape, and the flood of history and memory that can be mapped only through the other registers of the body affectively being in and moving with the landscape. Through the poetic form adept at marking ellipsis, space and

Figure 7.4  The Knitting Map: moving waves of colour. Photograph by Róisín O’Gorman.

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absence, Boland registers a traumatic history and maps the contemporary elision of that history and the impossibility of addressing such a time of violence. The Knitting Map’s project of knitting the everyday movements through traffic patterns on CCTV and the changes in the weather of the city would seem a world away from the unmarked famine roads. However, both work with Casey’s latter two categories and with Phelan’s attention to what the trace or outline can memorialize. As cartographies of withness, Boland’s potent poem reminds us of the cost of mapping and The Knitting Map of the need to pay attention to the mundane registers of how we move and that knitting up the ravelled sleeve of care matters.9 The Knitting Map also attends to the durational, the long-term withnessing in the landscape that Casey traces in the Earth Artists. Rather than seeing it as a spatial representation, the time-based durational element maps movement and change. The slow but inevitable movement of a line becoming stitches taking complex form like each drop of rain, each grain of earth compiling geological strata, maps the long term and interconnectivity of how we live together and weave around each other in shared space-time. This co-constitutional or relational understanding of moving and perceiving space and the critical political epistemologies that emerge from this understanding resonate with the work of Donna Haraway and Erin Manning, which the next section focusses on.

Section 2: ‘Situated knowledge’: Cartography and ‘relationscapes’ The Knitting Map offers a performative repertoire of embodied practice entwined with technologies of movement from half/angel’s repertoire and elaborated to a grand scale in this project. The Knitting Map resonates with feminist scholar Donna Haraway’s call for a way to situate knowledge claims for particular sites and ways of knowing. In her book, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Haraway grapples with the question of the objectivity of knowledge, especially the problematic illusion of the ‘god-trick’, that is, a vision from nowhere, infinite and all encompassing. To dismantle the illusion of this god-trick is to reclaim an embodied form of vision. A feminist objectivity then, is one that is particular, situated in a knowledge of its multiple and positional limits. Mapping in a Western phallogocentric model promises the full innocence the ‘god-trick’—a vision from everywhere, encompassing all in its view and the control that ensues as a seemingly natural occurrence. The particular use of CCTV networks, which only one member of the team (male) and the Gardaí had access to, engages with this call for a feminist knowledge. No one actually got to look at the raw images themselves; instead the company processed and recoded the surveillance technologies away from the predominant mode of looking into the felt tactility of movement. That is, the CCTV footage gathered movement patterns, which then tangled and translated back into the hands of the knitters. By weaving the cameras’ information back through the fingers feminised by knitting (no matter the gender of the knitter), The Knitting Map reimagined this all-encompassing point of view as situated knowledge of the city and its fluctuating movement patterns. Chapter 7  Textures of performance: Rethinking The Knitting Map   103

This embodied epistemology can be further understood through dance scholar Erin Manning’s work on the visual artworks, where she configures the moving and relational elements of mapping and painting (see Relationscapes 2009). Manning’s work offers a reading of movement knowledge and perceptual sensitivity as dance scholar and theorist. In her chapter, “Relationscapes: How Contemporary Aboriginal Art Moves Beyond the Map” she closely examines the paintings by artists from Central Australian Desert aboriginal communities understanding these examples as active mappings. More specifically, considering the work of Dorothy Napangardi’s Mina Mina (2005), she positions the work as “a creative vector of experience: it maps the future, not the past, leading us toward a recomposition of experience, a collaborative striation that smooths the space of encounter” (2009: 155). The breadth of Manning’s work moves in many directions outside the scope of this essay but she draws our attention in interesting ways to a form of mapping that helps to elaborate the intricate operations of The Knitting Map. The situated knowledge of The Knitting Map opens up to an entanglement of multiple registers: tactile and digital, ephemeral weather and durational traditional knitted patterns. To weave Haraway and Manning’s perspectives into our sensibility around mapping more broadly opens up a perceptual score for The Knitting Map where the city, its environment and its inhabitants entwine, entangle and co-constitute one another. Through The Knitting Map’s stitches, its flow and texture extends the possibility of such a relationscape where our daily trespasses in the flowing life of ourselves and cities map us in ways we do not always perceive. We are trained to think of moving as displacement, of finding our way as something that depends on technology and stability. Manning more broadly cracks open this point of view to see that, in fact, Relationscapes abound. They are not strictly relegated to the Aborigines and their experience of the Dreaming . . . Through their work, we move toward a topological hyperspace of experience, asking once again how emptiness is configured, how topologies extend our worlds, rhythmically (de)forming them, and how maps that sense-across create duration that eventfully alter how experience can unfold. (2009:183) The Knitting Map offers a performative durational relationscape that requires a shift in an understanding of mapping as fixed and finite. While Haraway acknowledges the necessity for situated and embodied knowledge which also accounts for the use of our technics and technologies, Manning reminds us to coordinate this with a sensibility of motion that refuses stillness, that is a situatedness on the move, but one that leaves its traces, a dancing withness of space, a mapping of the ongoingness of bodily experience in the technologies of the everyday. The Knitting Map then becomes a score of that mapping and moving and also a future tracing of possibilities of ongoing relationscapes with the ever-moving city. Try taking in The Knitting Map – you can’t – it is beyond the eye – you must follow it up or down the wall, out against the window panes, layered and layered in undulating colours, in clustered corners where stories are told quietly, to the room on the edge where someone burst in with news of the rain . . . who knows, it says, where we are going, but now we are here, can we follow this pattern? Can you pick up your needles and wool and dance? Textiles, Community and Controversy    104

Section 3: Dance score: Mapping resistance to movement The Knitting Map ask us to think about certain tensions and paradoxes within the work that don’t have to be resolved, that we can see as particular ways of knowing and seeing in the world. As it flowed across the gallery space in The Glucksman, next to the ever-moving River Lee outside, we can see there too the animate metaphors that the project mapped – the tensions between constants of motion and constraints and securities of being in place. Even if Irish traditional dance was not part of the formation of the project, the general reception and position of dance has an impact in the perception of the map. Dance is as much about what doesn’t move as what does, and within the Irish performance context we need to consider its own particular repertoire and idiom. As dance critic Diana Theodores notes, Irish performance produces a theatrical physicality that is intense in its lack of movement. In a concerted effort to map the developing dance scene in Ireland, Theodores traces the emergence of theatrical use of physical language in theatre, for example: “The intense physicality of Irish theatre is in its very resistance to movement” (1996: 205). Also, as noted by dance historians, the Irish dance tradition was carefully constructed through a particular physical vocabulary that sought to represent a national image and a mythic originary authenticity (see Catherine Foley (2001) and J’aime Morrison (2002), for example). Traditional knitting patterns also participate in the generation of a stalwart national identity of rural survival and robust outdoors graft and endurance. The stabilising of the dancing body (in Irish traditional dance and theatrical form) might well be seen in light of other nationalist identity formations, but that is another story, although one that The Knitting Map seems to have unwittingly encountered or disrupted. Instead, I add one last figure into the weave for now, one other character who enters this story and adds to the choreographic score of the project: the cyborg. This science-fiction figure would seem to run counter to an Irish identity associated now with wild Atlantic ways,10 wool and wet weather, however, she has a place here in this project as she has in many others, disrupting notions of organic femininity or overly simplified visions of what is nature or, indeed, what is natural. The figure of the cyborg reminds us to weave into the large-scale knitted outpouring the technologies tucked under the knitting stations in St Luke’s crypt, the countless metres of cabling translating digital code and driving the knitting patterns and the decades-long practice of half/angel company’s work with interweaving technologies and dance. The Knitting Map then evokes a twitching cyborg full of contradiction, irony, multiplicity and complexity. Haraway’s rendering of the cyborg in her Manifesto exhorts us to consider the cyborg as a rich texture with which to rethink gendered identity politics: There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exceptions. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. (1991: 180) Chapter 7  Textures of performance: Rethinking The Knitting Map   105

The Knitting Map registers bodily practice and demands movement of bodies that perceive it. It refuses to be pinned down in any one moment or interpretation for too long. We need to see the cyborg and the irony of her dance in The Knitting Map. However, there is always more than one reading, and reading it through performative perception is but only one further possibility that this essay has sought to interweave. If bodies are maps of identity and power, then the play of the digital in the making of The Knitting Map rewired the circuitry of identity politics of the city, bringing the everyday care of hands knitting communities and lives together into view. The relational landscapes of our coexistence need recognition. The stability of identity of women’s work that dared to integrate into the wired circuitry of a masculinist realm was on the move. Establishing a code that entangled traditional patterns that usually make jumpers, socks and scarves through computer coding, wired into the surveillance technologies of the city, messed with the boundaries of who belongs where in categories of gender, class and identity, especially in the realms of arts funding and the tacit valuing of the individual over the collective. However, the bodies dancing daily across the city are not so lost; they know where their hands are and what they can do. They are rendered in the weave of colour and pattern that shifts even as it repeats. We see the machinic in the mastery, the scale of the simple score developed, matured, leavened with time, craft and craftiness that make its magnitude visible: “The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they” (Haraway 1991: 180). The map that knits draws new boundaries, invites new measures of a landscape of the communities of bodies on the move across the space-time of the city.

Figure 7.5  The Knitting Map, floor view. The Glucksman, 2015. Photograph by Róisín O’Gorman.

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Conclusion The terrain of any map deals in imagination, and each map requires its key and legend to tell us how to read it. We forget this too readily where maps seem like natural or neutral tools of mobility, allowing us to render invisible the lives and bodies missing in the landscape. Maps offer a subtle normalisation of who matters and what is valued in a culture. The Knitting Map serves to remind us of the labour Figure 7.6  The Knitting Map, cables & moss stitch. of the imagination at work in any Photograph by Róisín O’Gorman. mapping, delivering new legends with which to read the significance in the mundane stitches of the everyday, the threads of care that hold us together, the continuity of civic life that is now ever more fragile and too often hangs by a thread. By attending to the material textures of tactility and movement in The Knitting Map, we can attune our reading to the elided bodies in any landscape; furthermore, understanding the inherently ephemeral nature of performance allows absence to be present if we pay attention to the outline or trace rather than assuming a representational smoothness. This reading of The Knitting Map through a feminist performance-focused sensibility asks us if we can remap our perceptions so that we attend to the ephemeral and to the politics that naturalises our perceptions. It allows us to move from the optic, satellite view to the dropped-in, up-close, haptic vision, which is more tactile than tactical, a tacit code offering a repatterning of perception. The Knitting Map moved knitting into new realms, moving it beyond domesticity and marginalisation, from solitary pastime to a collective cartographic reimagining of what matters in the everyday life of the city, of what is mappable and what is possible with a multitude of needles and an army of knitters. Through their fingers they conjured her, this dancing queen with a thousand pointy spikes at the ready, puncturing the patriarchal prosthesis of map-making, can you see it? This knitting map joins disparate threads in complex patterns of resistance to the tidying away of gender mapping and moves us into terrains that require an imaginative leap, a playful performative encounter with its score. The performatives at work in The Knitting Map, that is, the work it performs culturally and socio-politically, remind us of the legacies of cartography and the practices of attending to bodies moving and being moved. This chapter reconfigures The Knitting Map not as a static object but as an outline of a performance that continues to dance across our cultural imaginary with a material tactility on a scale beyond what the eye can behold. In this way it breathes as an ecology of interrelations, a map of possibilities and connections that refuses to be tied down, that demands we keep moving.

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8

Whereabouts uncertain Reading subversion in half/angel’s The Knitting Map in Cork, Ireland and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Deborah Barkun

“T

he whereabouts of . . . The Knitting Map . . . are uncertain” reported Kieran Dineen in 2012, seven years after the completion of the durational textile artwork hand-knitted by over twenty-five hundred volunteers under the auspices of Cork-based art and performance collective half/angel (Dineen 2012: 1). Dineen’s exhortation represented but the latest account of The Knitting Map as missing, which had circulated in the Cork media since 2006, following the public release of budgets for hundreds of projects that comprised the city’s year as 2005 European Capital of Culture. In January 2006, 96 FM, a popular Cork radio station, announced that The Knitting Map was “lost”, a story echoed in May 2012 by Ireland’s TV3, replete with footage of knitters weeping over the work’s alleged demise. In multiple accounts, then, in both print and broadcast, periodically over six years, the Irish media insisted that the massive work had disappeared. The Knitting Map lost? Its whereabouts uncertain? How does one misplace a 300-square-metre work of art the “size of a tennis court” (Dineen 2012: 1)? Where, indeed, had The Knitting Map gone?

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Maps are used to help one orient, to find direction, or locate one’s place in space. Unlike conventional maps, however, The Knitting Map embarked on an unexpected journey. In 2006, The Knitting Map premiered in Cork’s Millennium Hall, serving as a document of the city’s year as the European Capital of Culture, which had enabled its production. At the conclusion of the exhibition, The Knitting Map, secured in specially fabricated wooden crates, spent eighteen months in the old city morgue, a strangely suitable storage site for a work born of thousands of hours of handwork undertaken in the crypt of St Luke’s Church. From here, The Knitting Map crossed the Atlantic and spent a year at Lancaster County’s Millersville University of Pennsylvania, where it was exhibited, to great acclaim, at the Ganser Gallery. Following its return to Ireland in 2008, the piece was first housed in a manuscript storage site at University College Cork, before being relocated to more environmentally appropriate accommodations in nearby Kinsale. In 2015, The Knitting Map was uncrated, unfurled and installed in luscious cascading rivulets throughout the first floor of The Glucksman for a tenth-anniversary exhibition and symposium. Far from being “lost”, The Knitting Map had embarked an international journey, inspired by languages of stitches and code, and returned home. While such a homecoming can be construed as a triumph of art and of artistic labour, both conceptual and manual, in this case, The Knitting Map’s route had aroused consternation. Why had its visible absence in Cork conjured insistence on its loss? Moreover, what might be learned about the work’s reception and the attempt at critical erasure by charting its itinerary? To presume that The Knitting Map’s whereabouts are uncertain is to doubt the veracity and agency of a project meaningful to thousands of makers, viewers and scholars, yet apparently troublesome to a vocal contingent of critics and journalists, who seized on the work as a financial or representational folly. The curious chronicle of The Knitting Map’s indeterminate coordinates, culminating in Dineen’s resurrection of the rumour seven years after the work’s initial exhibition, capitalises on these earlier sentiments at a time of economic recession in Ireland and serves as the next chapter in an ongoing mythology of money and labour squandered. Dineen’s pronouncement of the missing Map, then, captured a zeitgeist of local sentiment in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger. In this context, a work of art already condemned in the media as “daft” (Hannigan, qtd. in Lynch 2005: 25) and “a useless monstrosity” (Mythen 2005: 10) fabricated by “a pack of oul’ biddies knitting” (qtd. in Lynch 2005: 26) proved an easy target. Indeed, The Knitting Map’s challenges to conventions of mimesis, fine art media and artistic labour, and stereotypes about singular genius and artistic agency – in essence, its participation in practices and discourses of contemporary art – put the piece at odds with general public perceptions of and assumptions about art. Suggestions about its loss, then, reflect generalised discomfort with and distrust of contemporary art and artists, in addition to particularities of Ireland’s position in international economies, both financial and cultural. Dineen’s account of the loss of a massive “blanket” perpetuates this generalised discomfort and revives specific condemnation of The Knitting Map by characterising it as banal and its producers and caretakers as careless, dim and fiscally reckless (Dineen 2012). Accounts of The Knitting Map as lost, I suggest, derive, in part then, from its circumstance as an unconventional map, that is, a conceptual map of Cork City and a work

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of contemporary Conceptual Art. As such, The Knitting Map is subject to many of the plights of Conceptual Art, more generally, which include ambivalent, incredulous or even hostile reception by audiences or critics. Moreover, while women knitting may strike some as entirely conventional, the conceptual, technological and artistic underpinnings of The Knitting Map reveal work of unconventional cartographers working in unconventional art media that joined human digits with digital technologies. By placing art and technology in the hands of volunteer knitters, primarily women over fifty, half/angel and The Knitting Map subverted stereotypes of artistic labour, agency and representation in ways that, I argue, proved uncomfortable for or threatening to sectors of the Irish audience in the context of the rapid change of the new millennium. In this context, Dineen’s description of the vast work of art as a missing “blanket” functions as an attempt to undermine The Knitting Map’s powers of subversion. A “blanket” becomes a threat when viewers sense its voice, value and potency as an art object. Here, I propose that perceived subversion in The Knitting Map’s unconventional representation of Cork City, generated by women through data-driven colour and stitch, subjected the work to forms of critical erasure performed by the Irish press as misplacement or loss. While the latter imply inadvertent acts, erasure suggests at least a measure of deliberation, one that has been part and parcel of historical occlusion of women, their voices and their labour, artistic and otherwise. In Ireland, even subtle recognition of The Knitting Map’s subversive properties was enough to provoke its critical erasure. Conversely, the work’s overwhelmingly positive and, indeed, emulative reception in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania suggests that, in this context, the audience read subversion in The Knitting Map not as threatening, but as affirming and empowering. Above, I describe The Knitting Map as a conceptual work in the vein of contemporary art, which is to say that its intentions, media and methods jointly produce a material object. The Knitting Map’s materiality is especially crucial, as knitting is both familiar and ephemeral. The hominess of knitted textile conjures, for many, sweaters—or jumpers—scarves or blankets. Knitting can be fabricated by loved ones, weakened by repeated wear or peppered with holes by developing moths. What then, might it mean to declare The Knitting Map subversive? In an essay introducing works by twenty-seven international contemporary artists featured in the exhibition Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting (2007) at New York’s Museum of Art and Design, Chief Curator David Revere McFadden prompts, “How does something as innocent and harmless as knitting become subversive?” (McFadden 2007: 8). In response, McFadden posits that the “essence of being subversive is to overthrow the status quo from the inside out” (2007: 8). According to McFadden, the events of 11 September 2001 gave rise to a resurgence of “knitting and other so-called ‘domestic’ handicrafts”, which generate interactive or communal avenues of support (2007: 8). Moreover, McFadden contends, the “sense of the hand – i.e., making something from start to finish by manual labor” reaffirms shared conditions of humanity usurped by the “clinical and impersonal nature of digital technologies” (2007: 8). For McFadden, then, the physical and interpersonal intimacies of handwork – in this case knitting – generally disarm viewers, making these media rife with subversive potential. According to this line of argument, The Knitting Map proves even more subversive, as its

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abundant handwork remains beholden to data-generating digital technologies. As with this exhibition and its successor, Pricked: Extreme Embroidery (2007), the enthusiastic reception of The Knitting Map in Lancaster County, the work’s sole venue outside of Cork City, suggests that “the aughts” represented a critical juncture when contemporary art and handwork coalesced in ways that especially resonated with American audiences. Conversely, The Knitting Map’s critical reception in Cork is significant because the stridency and conviction of its politics suggest that knitting is not universally perceived as “innocent or harmless”, as McFadden’s above comment supposes, and forecloses opportunities for reflection on the piece as a work of contemporary art. My forthcoming analysis of The Knitting Map’s reception in Cork and Lancaster County suggests that various audiences translate differently the work’s subversive elements, which stimulated its critical erasure from Ireland’s civic landscape, performed by the media as a myth of its disappearance. The Knitting Map’s critical reception in Ireland is distinctive. Following the announcement of funded projects for European Capital of Culture 2005, reporter Willie Dillon described the proposed Knitting Map as the project “that has so far most successfully captured the public’s imagination” (Dillon 2004: 4) and a capsule report in the Irish Examiner referred to it as “quirkily endearing” (Irish Examiner 2004: 9). Yet, as fabrication was underway, the project rapidly became a target of media scrutiny, which frequently deployed gendered language devaluing feminised labour. Mick Hannigan, director, at that time, of the Cork Film Festival, labelled the work “daft” (Lynch 2005), while Inside Cork columnist Katie Mythen reduced the volunteer knitters to “an army of knutters” (Mythen 2005: 10). Mythen’s critique is especially revealing for ways that her outrage overlays anxieties about funding for basic needs and about outsiders’ perceptions of Cork. Referring to The Knitting Map as an “absolute Frankensteinesque creation”, Mythen scornfully predicted that the work would spawn generations of “useless monstrosit[ies]” (2005: 10). In response to the work’s purported €300,000 funding, she writes: One way or another [The Knitting Map] will be remembered, possibly in the hallowed pages of the Guinness Book of World Records: a feat to rival the Bermuda Triangle, our ‘rectangle of shame,’ the Cork Calamity representing the utter waste one country can achieve, given enough funding and 365 days. (Mythen 2005: 10) While Mythen goes on to posit a succession of “giant jumpers” and fountains spouting Guinness, her vitriolic hyperbole masks frustration with civic need more generally, as she suggests that a breast cancer detection clinic would be a worthy investment (2005: 10). In this sense, the in-progress project serves as a scapegoat for Mythen’s disregard for the city’s fiscal management and is subject to debates over public funding, more generally. Mythen concludes her column by stating that visitors to Cork during its year as Capital of Culture will “laugh . . . all the way home”, indicating that her rejection of The Knitting Map, in part, relates to concerns that visitors will perceive it, and therefore Cork City and its residents, as foolish (Mythen 2005: 10). During this period of prosperity, for Mythen, the notion of Cork and Ireland being represented internationally by a surplus of knitting,

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a medium historically marked as feminine and economically essential and connected to long-standing and yet unhealed colonial injuries, remained unbearable (Barkun and Gilson 2010: 8). Like other detractors, Mythen either failed or refused to recognise the data-mining, coding and algorithmic technologies that made possible The Knitting Map’s handwork (Barkun and Gilson 2010: 8–9) and that evoked contemporaneity and innovation. The myth of The Knitting Map’s loss converted this blind spot for technology into critical erasure and effectively affirmed the “daftness” of the work, its producers and its stewards. Rumours of the project’s loss, then, functioned as a form of censure. Historical erasure of women artists—or artists who happen to be women—is endemic to dominant narratives of history of art, something that feminist historians and critics work to rectify. Conceptual Art presents particular issues, as forms of conceptual labour and material insubstantiality challenge viewer assumptions of conventional artistic labour and objecthood. In “Escape Attempts”, the introductory essay to the reprint edition of the groundbreaking Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, art critic, theorist and curator Lucy Lippard reflects on 1960s-era Conceptual Art from the distance of more than thirty years. In her analysis, gender figures prominently among challenges that confronted artists working in 1960s Conceptual Art idioms and the resultant artworks. Conceptual Art’s materiality—evanescent, theoretical or quotidian—which confounded many, provided access to women artists historically excluded from more conventional and male-dominated forms of art-making, such as painting and sculpture. Lippard writes, “the inexpensive, ephemeral, unintimidating character of Conceptual mediums themselves (video, performance, photography, narrative, text, actions) encouraged women to participate, to move through this crack in the art world’s walls” (Lippard 1997: xi). If Conceptualism’s unconventional materials and processes offered opportunities for women to intervene in contemporary practice, it did not lead to substantially increased career recognition or longevity. Lippard recounts by name twenty-seven artists included in a 1973 international women’s Conceptual exhibition she curated that toured to seven cities worldwide. “I list all these names here”, she writes, “as I said on a catalogue card at the time, ‘by way of an exasperated reply on my own part to those who say there are no women making conceptual art.’ For the record, there are a great many more than could be exhibited here” (1997: xi). Lippard’s insistence on recording artists’ names indicates that, in 1973 and 1997 alike, women and women’s work had the tendency to be “lost”, that is, erased. As described by Lippard, the particular liabilities facing women Conceptual Artists of the 1970s resonate strikingly with critical rhetoric surrounding The Knitting Map in Ireland, much of which implicated the feminine workforce and the feminised medium and handwork. Like knitting, the media and materials Lippard recounts permitted women to breach long-standing barriers and enter the art world subversively through the use of material and processes unconventional to fine art. At the same time, ephemeral or quotidian materials are subject to contingencies of time, potentially exacerbating opportunities for disappearance or erasure. Such erasure was not limited to the fragility of textile, however, as the technology embedded in The Knitting Map’s conceptual premise, and

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that compiled data that mapped the living city and its weather, and that made possible its daily creation, was also deleted from Irish accounts (Barkun and Gilson 2010: 8–9). If The Knitting Map’s makers accessed the art world through a “crack in the . . . walls”, as had their 1970s predecessors, it was a crack enabled by fusing traditional craft media with emergent technologies, and its presence proved untenable to an outspoken group of critics and detractors, who propagated a story of its vanishing. International audiences, less immediately conversant in Cork or Irish political, economic or cultural contexts, perceived The Knitting Map as a large-scale textile installation, which spoke through vocabularies of contemporary art, community engagement and memory. Based on visits to The Knitting Map, staff of arts and cultural foundations in London, Newcastle, Strasbourg and Amsterdam invited half/angel to develop future projects, and media coverage in Austria, Finland, Norway, Poland, France, the United Kingdom and the United States likewise viewed the work through lenses of contemporary practice (Barkun and Gilson 2010: 6). From the perspective of specialised audiences outside of Cork and Ireland, The Knitting Map undoubtedly evoked, on an ambitious scale, formerly marginalised voices and media in form, material and process that subtly and subliminally manifested a quiet rebellion, the subversion that McFadden champions. If vocal contingents in Ireland perceived as threatening The Knitting Map’s subversive undermining of the status quo, viewers in Central Pennsylvania, the only other site of the project’s exhibition, received the subversion as empowering, as borne out by participation in an interactive performance organised with half/angel artists in conjunction with the exhibition. In Lancaster County, the project stimulated a reciprocal action that moved from the gallery context to the streets and back, and elicited enthusiastic responses. Unmoored from the political and economic circumstances of Ireland, visitors to The Knitting Map channelled the work’s subversion in ways conversant with its makers and with the agency they perceived in the piece. The Knitting Map journeyed across the Atlantic through the efforts of Jeri Robinson, an artist and Professor of Art at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, who sought out the project while in Ireland on a research sabbatical to study the histories of wool and knitting. During her time in Cork, Robinson met Gilson and became one of the knitters involved in fabricating the piece. She recalls, “when I realized that I could actually participate in the creation of The Knitting Map I felt as if I could be part of the rich history and culture of Ireland rather than a simple bystander or admirer” (Jeri Robinson in discussion with the author, November 2015), something that drew her closer to her cultural roots as both an Irish American and a textile artist. Robinson’s experience of collaborating on The Knitting Map and the affinity she recognised between the strong textile traditions of Ireland and Lancaster County, a region steeped in a rich history of fibre arts, notably Amish and Mennonite quilting, led her to organise an exhibition of the piece at the university’s Ganser Gallery (2007), accompanied by Gilson and half/angel assistant Margaret Kennedy. When four large wooden chests containing The Knitting Map arrived in Millersville University’s Art Department, the scent of cedar, a fragrance that evokes anticipation and nostalgia, filled the air. Unpacking the work itself undertook a ritual quality as students

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and community members uncrated The Knitting Map in a choreography that was at once reverent and full of delight. Photographs documenting The Knitting Map’s unpacking and installation in the Ganser Gallery show Kennedy and Millersville University art students, in stockinged feet, snaking about the gallery to gently unroll the lengths of knitted textile and place them along the gallery floor (Figures 8.1 and 8.2). For students, the process of fashioning valleys, flows and rivulets from the collaboratively knit textile was to channel the work’s conceptual premise and the energy, purpose and pride of its makers. Unlike The Knitting Map’s initial installation in Cork’s vast Millennium Hall, the dimensions of which enabled the piece to lay relatively flat, the intimate space of the Ganser Gallery inspired a more topographical installation. In this comparatively small space, Gilson, Kennedy and their student assistants gathered and whorled the knitted panels, forming a lush aerial landscape that draped over and flowed through the gallery (Figure 8.3). Installed in this manner, The Knitting Map is less remarkable for its scale than for its geographical diversity, in which low-lying areas become arid plains interrupted by oases of crystalline lakes and lush rolling hills, rocky outcroppings and rushing rivers. Here, variances in texture and colour contribute to The Knitting Map’s rich landscape: cable knits form cliffs, parallel ribs compose agricultural terraces and popcorn stiches morph into orchards. To artist and Millersville University sculpture professor Line Bruntse, “the idea that the map physically became . . . a landscape made up of weather was absolutely fascinating to me . . . I saw sky, earth, horizon, drama” (Line Bruntse in discussion with the author, October 2015). Far from invoking blankets or jumpers, Bruntse describes an

Figure 8.1  The Knitting Map arrives in Pennsylvania; students from the Department of Art & Design at Millersville University help unpack The Knitting Map for the exhibition at The Ganser Gallery in 2007. Photograph by Deborah Barkun.

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Figure 8.2  Arranging The Knitting Map in The Ganser Gallery, Millersville University, Pennsylvania, USA in 2007. Photograph by Deborah Barkun.

Figure 8.3  Margaret Kennedy (right) supervises the exhibition installation of The Knitting Map in The Ganser Gallery, Millersville University, Pennsylvania, USA in 2007. Photograph by Deborah Barkun.

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experience in which The Knitting Map transforms the gallery into space that vividly and fancifully conjures experiences with weather and terrain. The Lancaster County reception unburdened The Knitting Map from debates that had surrounded its fabrication and exhibition in Cork. Apart from Robinson, audiences were unaware of The Knitting Map’s controversial reception in Ireland. Unbound by its national and civic contexts, the work’s art and artistry went unquestioned, regardless of whether or not audiences had background in art or frequented museums or galleries. half/angel’s increasingly topographical installation strategy, necessitated by the gallery’s small scale, undoubtedly affected viewers’ readings of the piece. In the Ganser Gallery installation, The Knitting Map differently and, arguably, more viscerally connoted landscape and its mapping than did its prior installation. The currents and eddies of knitted textile encouraged environmental associations, as Bruntse’s above comments attest. The work’s resemblance to iconic landscape, and hence more conventional maps, may have contributed to audience associations with place and the particular reception of the piece. Entering the Gallery, viewers described sensing an immediate affinity for Cork residents’ desires to fabricate an experience of place. The understanding of place, affected by colour, climate and community, is intimately connected to one’s relationship to and traversal of space, and, conversely, the ways in which visual and social landscape informs identity. The weekend following the installation, Lancaster County visitors to The Knitting Map had an opportunity to channel the kinship they felt toward the work’s creators when they boarded a Red Rose Trolley for “Knit Lancaster”, a performative knitting event, coordinated by Robinson, in tribute to the 2005 conceptual mapping of Cork City (Figure 8.4). Aboard the trolley and armed with knitting needles and wool Robinson supplied, participants invoked techniques of chance to dictate stitch and rhythm. Without issuing directions to the trolley driver, the knitters allowed his route through Lancaster City to dictate the motion of their hands and needles. Standing at the helm, Robinson translated the route into stiches: when the trolley headed north: knit stitches; a turn to the east: moss stitches; south: purl stitches; and west: 2 x 2 rib stitches. Robinson and her students selected colours to symbolise aspects of the community’s identity: red for the Red Rose City; blue for the Puerto Rican flag; green for the abundant Lancaster County agriculture; and tan to symbolise the Amish community. Whereas in Cork cameras compiled the data that ultimately dictated complexity of stitch, here the knitters were themselves mobile and responsive to changes in the trolley’s course. The trolley’s path through the Figure 8.4  Knit Lancaster participant; part of performance urban environment encouraged knitters to events during the exhibition of The Knitting Map at The Ganser share personal stories of Lancaster County Gallery, Millersville University, Pennsylvania, USA in 2007. Photograph by Deborah Barkun. and their motivations for knitting, thereby

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transforming the mundane atmosphere of public transit into a roving “knit-in” (Figures 8.5 and 8.6). People from all “walks of life were united by a skein of yarn”, relates participant Jolanda Dranchak, “for that whole trolley ride, we knitted our words, memories and conversations into . . . small pattern swatches. We recorded our moment in time using yarn” (Jolanda Dranchak in discussion with the author, October 2015). Participants documented their memories, conversation and time using stitches that recorded direction and colours that registered regional values of ethnic or religious diversity, ecology, industry and history. In other words, the trolley knitters mapped something of shared identities that transcend relative differences in lifestyle to which Dranchak refers. Like residents of Cork, who, despite their relative differences, share weather, traffic and monitoring by closed-circuit cameras, the knitting generated during the trolley action signified bonds of community. Significantly, in the context of Lancaster County, passive viewing of The Knitting Map proved insufficient. Rather, its vocabulary of stitches, which serve as documents of labour, inspired actions that eclipsed the rarified gallery context and impelled the audience to knit and to share while circumnavigating common surroundings.

Figure 8.5  Chatting on the Trolley for Knit Lancaster, an event organised by Jeri Robinson as part of The Knitting Map exhibition at The Ganser Gallery, Millersville University, Pennsylvania, USA in 2007. Photograph by Deborah Barkun.

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Figure 8.6  Knitters aboard a Red Rose Trolley in Lancaster, PA for Knit Lancaster, an event organised by Jeri Robinson as part of The Knitting Map exhibition at The Ganser Gallery, Millersville University, Pennsylvania, USA in 2007. Photograph by Deborah Barkun.

At the end of the event, the group gathered at a satellite site of the Lancaster Museum of Art to join their knitted panels into a Möbius strip (Figure 8.7), which served as a prop for a culminating performance by Gilson, recalled by Robinson: as she moved throughout the space with the linear piece, made by all those on the trolley ride, her motions were rhythmic and fluid, hence encapsulating the movement of traffic in and out of Cork, along with the changing weather patterns. The performance took me . . . back to Cork in my mind and my participation in The Knitting Map’s creation and evolution. (Jeri Robinson, pers. comm., 6 January 2015) As described by Robinson, the artist’s body assimilates into movement rhythms of trolley, traffic and weather. Drawing from her background as a dancer and choreographer, Gilson wound around and through the architecture of the former industrial warehouse, trailing and arcing the twisted length of knitting, transfixing viewers. Gilson’s choice of geometrical form here is significant. In mathematics, a Möbius strip, a three-dimensional form with only one side and one edge, is considered a “non-orientable” surface, meaning that, as a single-sided object, its surface is beholden to no consistent choice of orientation. Textiles, Community and Controversy    118

Figure 8.7  Knitting from Knit Lancaster, organised as part of The Knitting Map exhibition at The Ganser Gallery, Millersville University, Pennsylvania, USA in 2007. Photograph by Deborah Barkun.

For purposes here, the knitted Möbius strip’s non-orienting properties symbolically unify regions and populations and, perhaps, act as an antidote for the strife surrounding The Knitting Map in Ireland that culminated in the work’s critical erasure, performed by the media as the myth of its uncertain whereabouts. This chapter opened with a suggestion that conventional maps help one orient, find direction or locate one’s place in space. half/angel conceived The Knitting Map as accountable to alternative renderings of place. The Knitting Map positions one unconventionally, according to an inconsistent orientation symbolised by the Möbius strip and embodied in its hand-knit materialisation. In practice, The Knitting Map and related activities achieved confluence between generations of knitters on two continents separated by distance and national and geographic boundaries. For Dranchak, interacting with The Knitting Map “confirmed knitting patterns as a recording device, a tool of a Chapter 8  Whereabouts uncertain    119

different kind” (Jolanda Dranchak, pers. comm., 9 January 2015), in this case, serving to document Lancaster County reception through reciprocal acts of creating community and of knitting place and identity. By leaving open to chance the course of the journey—in other words, by reading the Map differently—Knit Lancaster participants embraced an unpredictable path and mapped it through their knitting, just as indeterminate traffic and weather data guided The Knitting Map’s coordinates of life in Cork City. One might refer to caprices of transit, traffic and weather as “predictably unpredictable”. One knows—as did half/angel—that these variables are, indeed, variable. The maelstrom of Irish criticism of the Map’s funding, making, exhibition and purported loss, and the warm response of Lancaster County audiences, demonstrated themselves to be similarly unpredictable and variable. Both populations surveyed The Knitting Map and read subversion in its codes, but how this subversion was perceived—as empowerment, or threat, or something else altogether—was dependent on context. Maps of all kinds tell stories. The Knitting Map’s subversive tales of gender, labour, technology and material will continue to unravel and evolve as it undertakes its unpredictable journey.

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the following individuals and institutions for their contributions to or support of research and writing: Line Bruntse, Jolanda Dranchak, Jess Mardon, Nicola Moffat, the Millersville University of Pennsylvania Department of Art, Irene Murphy, Mick O’Shea, Jeri Robinson, Javier Salas, Nick Scoville, and Ursinus College.

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9

On seeing, still Bernadette Sweeney

Every artist feels the desire to create for him [or her] self a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant and significant things of this marred and clumsy universe. . . . Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a little . . . —W.B. Yeats, Preface to The Celtic Twilight

On photography . . . I have four older brothers, and two of them are photographers. I spent many hours as a child in the upstairs bathroom or the attic of my parents’ house in Ennis agitating baths of developing fluid in the red glow of an improvised dark room light, watching images ghost across the blankness – photographs of rally cars caught mid-flight on an Irish back road . . . seascapes . . . rarely faces. Later I would go home at weekends to help my brother Aidan if he had a wedding to photograph – I’d hold ladders, straighten frothy wedding dress trains, haul tripods, forming short-lived but powerful bonds with utter strangers and seeing them in their best, at their best, or occasionally, at their worst . . .

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I’ve always associated photography with family . . . I credit any visual awareness I have to those hours with my brothers, time spent in love and laughter, capturing the ephemeral for later. As a theatre maker my instincts are informed by photography, as I often photograph the work in progress and look at these images between rehearsals, to find a stillness in a gesture that might be powerful, balance I want to retain, or perhaps disrupt. In my research into performance, presence and Irish theatre I was heavily reliant on the visual archives of theatre companies including the Abbey, Druid and some professional theatre photographers including Amelia Stein and Ros Kavanagh (Sweeney 2008, Sweeney and Kelly 2010, and various articles and productions). They were all generous with their time and access to their materials. As researcher, while I find video documentation extremely useful, I have always found myself more drawn to the photographs, which may seem contradictory as they don’t capture voice or movement. But it is in their being not theatre that I find them most poetic – as they gesture towards performance on their own terms. They bear witness, serve as audience member, record keeper, memory holder. Of course they can also be misleading, creating a powerful impression of a production that the quality of work itself could not support – but in that failure they are like performance itself, so often subjective, with a slippery intent. In my own photography I sometimes wonder if I am hoarder – I want to store, to keep, to capture whatever moment it is that I don’t want to forget . . . Susan Sontag in her essay ‘On Photography’ reminds us that to collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. (Sontag 1973: 2)

On looking back . . . As I type I am listening to the scrape of stools behind me as a coffee shop employee cleans the floor in anticipation of the lunchtime Missoula rush – such as it is. It’s still hazy outside but the crazy levels of smoke from the last weeks of forest fires have started to clear, fires not just in Montana but throughout the northwest. I’m trying to hurry as I have rehearsal soon, but these pictures are taking me back to an earlier time, and I’d like to sit in the smoke of ‘Hope and Memory’ and ‘be with [them] for a little’.

I moved to Cork from Dublin in 2002 to take a position as lecturer in theatre at University College Cork. This was in the early planning stages of Cork City of Culture 2005 and I felt excitement for the possibilities that such a project might open. Obviously as junior faculty in a terribly under-resourced, fledgling department it was my primary responsibility to deliver curriculum content to our students, but I was looking for ways to craft my involvement in Cork 2005 as a theatre artist. My involvement turned out to

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be as self-appointed photographer photo-documenting The Knitting Map preparatory performances in 2004 and in working with our first-year students on The White Quadrangle, both productions by half/angel, a company codirected by my then-colleague and still-friend Jools Gilson. Therefore, in 2004 before the formal activities of the 2005 Cork City of Culture began, I photo-documented a number of performances by half/angel around the city of Cork. These performances involved Gilson creating a knitting-themed dance improvisation in a chosen area of Cork once a month, and were, in the company’s words, ‘a series of lead-up events and workshops, introducing the project to the general public in venues in and around Cork City, and creating fun meeting places for our ever-growing army of knitters’ (http://halfangel.info/knitting-ie/gallery.html). What these events were leading up to was, of course, The Knitting Map, a 2005 Cork City of Culture project by half/angel now often described as controversial but, at the time of its inception, a wonderful vision of a year-long durational community event. And in many ways it turned out to be just that. The 2004 events were thus intended as ‘lead-up’, or warm up events for the large-scale project of The Knitting Map itself but, speaking in terms of performance at least, I thought that these ‘lead-up’ events were just as compelling, if not more so. Peggy Phelan wrote in her seminal essay on performance that Performance in a strict ontological sense is nonreproductive. It is this quality which makes performance the runt of the litter of contemporary art. P ­ erformance clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital. (Phelan 1993: 146) My photographic ambitions with this project were not to try to reproduce the work, or even to represent it in any full sense, but to leave a trace of it that may remind us of the essence of it, that it mattered, once . . . Each month Jools Gilson would perform as a knitter in an unlikely setting, costumed in a contextually appropriate ‘uniform’ that would, on closer inspection, turn out to have been hand-knitted. Two of the most striking examples were the bus-conductor’s uniform and the biker’s outfit. To see these relatively everyday uniforms lovingly reconstructed in yarn,1 with painstaking attention to detail, was actually hilarious, as hopefully the pictures here can illustrate. The whimsical nature of this as a gesture was matched by the welcoming, open nature of the performances themselves.

Why photo-document? I chose to photo-document a number of these performances as a theatre research project: to try to chart how the performance–audience member contract would shift in these community spaces, without a formal theatre venue, script or other conventions. Theatre in the community is nothing new and has been part of the culture of performance since theatre’s earliest beginnings, insofar as we have been able to chart them. Theatre is in itself a kind of ritual, and performative rituals have enjoyed an intimate relationship with their

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participants and audiences for centuries. I had had plenty of opportunity to experience outdoor performance by this point, having worked as a performer with Macnas and Theatre Omnibus, as a theatre workshop and performance leader with Wet Paint and with companies in Northern Ireland including Out and Out Theatre and Scarecrow. I had also directed outdoor performance projects with students at Trinity when teaching performance as a postgraduate student in the theatre department. But I was always too busy performing on adrenalin to record or interrogate the unadulterated liveness of this performer/spectator event – it was always too real, too fast, I daren’t drop my focus for a minute. With half/ angel, here was my chance to document, to investigate, record and analyse. Every time we as performers step outside the walls of the theatre we are taking a different kind of risk – the rules don’t apply and we have to be prepared for all manner of unanticipated audience engagement and reaction. My mother was from West Cork (and later, in 2007, my eldest daughter was born in Cork, too) so I knew that Cork audiences would be a law unto themselves – more than ready to break any rules that we think the conventions of theatre have given us. So often when we plan a theatre performance that invites direct audience engagement or response we worry that nothing will happen – this was not a worry in Cork! As a performer and director this is the kind of work that scares me the most, but as an audience member I am always enthralled.2 I undertook this photo investigation at that time as I wanted to scrutinise this kind of audience engagement up close, and often at these events having a camera gives you a kind of permission that you wouldn’t have otherwise. Also, frankly, I was curious, and a little intrigued . . . I’ve always associated photography with family . . . and so it seemed obvious that I would undertake this project with Jools as performer, as she was a central member of my new Cork family . . . I would act as photographer, assistant stage manager in situ, and occasionally her (relatively small) ‘heavy’ should the need arise . . . Looking at these photographs now, thirteen years after the events documented, I am reminded of little things that happened ‘off camera’, when I quietly moved things out of way, unravelled yarn that might be a potential trip hazard, answered questions from the public, opened up or closed off space like a camera-wielding body guard, things that I had forgotten completely . . . When I look at these images as performance documentation, what strikes me still is what struck me at the time, how Jools as performer engaged with her audience, especially children, in a manner that encouraged their participation and piqued their curiosity – what was she doing? Dancing? Knitting? Laughing? Gilson herself described her work in a recent email: It’s interesting because when I think of these performances, I don’t really think of them as dances, but as street stand-up or something, or as comedy improv. I don’t even know what they were! . . . Whilst I certainly used my dancing body, I also played with people and place and architecture: with what was there in that present tense. I played, I cajoled, I teased. I played. Isn’t it funny that a traditional play text is called a play. What I did here was play. (Jools Gilson, email correspondence, September 2017) Textiles, Community and Controversy    124

Over the course of that year-long project I watched her expand an already impressive range as improviser: as she crouched low to whisper to a small child, leaned in the window of a car in traffic to teach the driver how to knit, laughed with passengers on a Bus Éireann city bus. As a dancer her sometimes formal danced gestures lent her an otherness that allowed us to watch, to gape as she moved through these public spaces, costumed in knitted garb, blowing bubbles or dancing on the top of a motorbike. The pictures I have chosen to include tried to catch these ephemeral, good-natured moments of performer/audience engagement.

The Crawford Gallery: January 2004 Figure 9.1 became, without being credited correctly, one of the signature publicity images of Cork City of Culture 2005. I know why they wanted it, or at least, why I took it. (In assembling these photographs I smile ruefully as I realise I am still cross about this, and try to look at the image with fresh eyes . . . it’s still mine, I still have it, still . . . )3 I liked the lines – the tails of the knitted coat echo the three female figures in the frame, the braided stitches echoed by the braided hair; the central dancer is flanked by two young children in an image that seems to suggest a moment of learning and sharing, a maternal

Figure 9.1  Jools Gilson performing in the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork City, Ireland, January 2004; a seed event for The Knitting Map in 2005. Photograph by Bernadette Sweeney.

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moment perhaps . . . Jools leans towards the older child on the right of the image, but the presence of the little one adds balance and sweetness. As a mother of two girls myself now, this image means more to me than it did when I took it – I impose moments with my own children in there – although getting them to sit still long enough for a moment such as this seems unlikely!

The still image suggests a moment of stillness in the performance – to my memory at least this is correct – Jools closed herself and these two girls off from the rest of us – then opened back up to the crowd – closing then opening, a movement sequence redolent of the act of knitting itself. Here the Crawford as a formal public gallery space is indicated by what we can see of the panelling, flooring and so on, but in this case the artwork is on the floor, and thereby seems irresistibly available to us.

Pope’s Quay: February 2004 The piece shown in Figure 9.2 was performed outside the building4 in the parking area before moving indoors. I chose to include this image here as it shows how the work, not just in this

Figure 9.2  Jools Gilson performing outside Civic Trust House, Cork City, Ireland, February 2004; a seed event for The Knitting Map in 2005. Photograph by Bernadette Sweeney.

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instance but over the entire year, existed in public ordinary spaces; while we see Gilson again engaging with a child by incorporating him into the performance as knitter, I love how we can see Cork city shoppers continuing with their busy Saturday, seemingly oblivious to the knitting dancer/dancing knitter in the carpark behind them. Gilson here is adjusting her costume in the gravelly weedy lot, its everyday function thrown into relief by the whimsy of her presence as dancer – all the while being taken so seriously by her earnest little helper. I didn’t know what I was doing (in that sense of rehearsal and planning), and yet I knew the way. I followed that twinkle in a child’s eye. ( Jools Gilson, email correspondence, September 2017)

Merchant’s Quay Shopping Centre: March 2004 In March half/angel went straight into the heart of Cork’s shopping district, to the Merchant’s Quay Shopping Centre. I include Figures 9.3 and 9.4 here, as again Jools is engaging with a very young audience, and the intrigue she generated pulled the attention of a much larger audience of shoppers. In the first image we see her in her moss green knitted cloak going up one of the central escalators holding a young baby. There is an other-worldliness to this image that was quite striking at the time. The cabling on the back

Figure 9.3  Jools Gilson with Oisín O’Neill on the elevator in Merchant’s Quay Shopping Centre, Cork City, Ireland, March 2004; a seed performance event for The Knitting Map in 2005. Photograph by Bernadette Sweeney.

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Figure 9.4  Jools Gilson, knitting performance in Merchant’s Quay Shopping Centre, Cork City, Ireland, March 2004; a seed event for The Knitting Map in 2005. Photograph by Bernadette Sweeney.

of her cloak combined with its colour and style suggested that she was almost a magical creature, and her movements for this location were sometimes secretive or guarded. She doesn’t belong here, and she knows it: part of the effectiveness of the performance lay in the moments when the shoppers realised that there was an ‘other’ in their midst. On the escalator she stood still, cradling the child. I can’t remember if I asked her later if she knew the family,5 or if so, what her answer was, but watching her take the child in her arms in the middle of the performance and then mount the escalator with him in her arms was almost shocking. In this image again the context of the performance is heightened for us by the inscrutable stance of the security guard above. In the second image it is the stillness at its centre that strikes me: Gilson and her young audience member are caught in a moment of communion as the world rushes by – they have secrets, knitting secrets, just between themselves. I like how we see her crouched on top of a shopping centre dustbin, a fairly unromantic perch for such magic, as the swirl of shoppers and buggies go about their regular business.

May: The Vision Centre The Cork Vision Centre is an arts exhibition space in the restored St Peter’s Church in North Main Street. This month’s performance installation began on the street as Gilson, like the pied piper, collected a growing group of curious viewers and drew them towards Textiles, Community and Controversy    128

the Vision Centre. The streets in this ancient area of the city are quite tight, and single-lane traffic is often at a standstill. In Figure 9.5 from the May performance, Gilson took advantage of this to lean in the window of a small silver car to give the driver a quick knitting lesson. It happened so quickly I remember worrying at the time if the driver would be willing, but he absolutely was. Onwards to the exhibition centre where again she danced Figure 9.5  Jools Gilson, knitting performance; teaching a passing driver to inside and outside and we see in knit outside Cork Vision Centre, North Main Street, Cork, Ireland, May 2004. Figure 9.6 how she allowed the Photograph by Bernadette Sweeney. nature of the yarn to inform her choreography and the direction of her gaze as she knit. In Figure 9.7 of this sequence we don’t see the dancer at all, but see an audience member and participant in the knit-in after the performance, standing before a group of volunteer knitters, seemingly lost in her own world as she negotiates her way through the room, with yarn, needle and knitting bag over her arm. I especially like this image as it reminds me of the range of audience members, from infants to the old, all brought together by The Knitting Map, still a full six months before it formally began.

Figure 9.6  Jools Gilson performing outside Cork Vision Centre during the May Knit-in, North Main Street, Cork, Ireland, 2004. Photograph by Bernadette Sweeney.

Figure 9.7  The May Knit-in at Cork Vision Centre, North Main Street, Cork, Ireland, May 2004. Photograph by Bernadette Sweeney.

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June: On the buses ‘On the buses’ was perhaps my favourite of these events and so I have included more images of this than of the others, and favour it over some months that are not represented by images in this article at all. I do this because this event seemed to generate the most in terms of outdoor site-specific performance and its engagement with an audience. It moved from a bus shelter to the bus itself to the busy downtown streets of Cork city, again on a busy Saturday afternoon. In Figure 9.8 we see Gilson, in a modified version of a bus conductor’s uniform, knitting at a bus stop, baskets of yarn at her feet. This image has a double-take quality to it  – it’s not odd at first glance but it certainly is on the second. The gesture’s provocation is in its straight-faced nature – and Jools has barely started. On the bus itself Gilson encounters travellers on their regular route and takes the opportunity to give them a quick knitting lesson (Figure 9.9). She is supported by her growing army of knitting volunteers, some of whom are on the bus with her (Figure 9.10). I remember taking this shot because I noticed at the time how the decorative block wall outside the bus window by the knitting volunteer seemed as if built to a complex knitting pattern. Once they disembarked, the knitters again took on the city on a busy summer Saturday, but Gilson takes the time to talk to a young knitter under a road works sign (Figure 9.11). Here, as much if not more than with half/angel’s other monthly performances, the power of the performance stems Figure 9.8  Jools Gilson waiting for the bus in Mayfield, North Cork, at from the magic of its premise in the beginning of the June 2004 performance seed event for The Knitting counterpoint to the functionality of Map – on the buses, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival. Photograph by Bernadette Sweeney. its setting.

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Figure 9.9  Jools Gilson knitting on the buses with passengers, as part of a city-wide performance event and knit-in, June 2004. Photograph by Bernadette Sweeney.

Figure 9.10  Participant knitting on the bus from Mayfield to Cork City Centre, June 2004. Photograph by Bernadette Sweeney.

Figure 9.11  Jools Gilson performance in Daunt Square, Cork City Centre, as part of the seed event and knit-in ‘on the buses’ in June 2004. Photograph by Bernadette Sweeney.

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September: Ride out with bikers

Figure 9.12  Jools Gilson performance in Emmet Place, with local motorbike clubs, September 2004. Photograph by Bernadette Sweeney.

Figure 9.12 is from Gilson’s ‘ride out with bikers’ in September. Here Gilson rode out from the outskirts of the city to the city centre with a group of bikers, the Norries Motor Cycle Club, escorted by the Gardai (Pocock 2005). She knit en route and talked to other bikers, drivers and pedestrians as they made their way downtown. She cajoled others to join in, including a skateboarder whose usual place in that urban landscape had been usurped. For me one of the biggest successes of this venture was the knitted costume itself, pictured here as Gilson stands knitting on the bike. The detail and the very incongruous nature of biking gear being hand-knit made the costume a central gesture in the choreography of this particular performance. Hand-knits have gone from being the homely ‘homespun’ garb of the poor of the community to the expensive output of trendy hobbyists. A hand-knit biking suit would offer you little protection on the back of a motorbike, or, heaven forbid, should you fall off. These hand-knit biking ‘leathers’ were a gesture towards the unlikely – suggesting a granny’s love and a biker’s fierce machismo all at once.

On seeing now I was looking for one or two photographs of this long ago project when I found the cache – a little time capsule of life before seismic shifts – before I married a Montanan, before I had either of my girls, before I moved to Montana. And yet I’m still me, and looking at these photographs reminds me not just of the performances, but of how I photographed them, and I suspect I would photograph them exactly the same way now . . .

I was and am drawn to movement, to moments of stillness within movement, to shared unspoken communion between performer and audience member, to the unlikely, contradictory, elegant and ugly. I still remember these performances as good-natured, and they were, but they were other things too: performance installation can often be written off as po-faced, overly politicised or silly. These Knitting Map lead-up performances were none of those things – they held many elements of what The Knitting Map itself was later taken to task for – they took a heavily feminised traditional craft and moved it centre stage, and yes, there is an audacity to that; they staged a pastime that is pejoratively considered as

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one done by gossips, older, harmless society members, sitting on the margins, commentators at best, interfering at worst. Knitting and textiles of course live in the industrial memory of Cork, such as with the old Sunbeam factory in the north of the city, with its heavily female workforce, which closed in 1993 and burned down in September 2003. To focus on an activity such as knitting seemed bold, was deemed unworthy of our serious attention – hence the ridicule levelled towards The Knitting Map by some of its detractors. The Knitting Map and its lead-up events were asking for trouble – taking as they did knitting, a celebration of women’s work, community theatre, fun and making something beautiful with them, and, worst of all, spending public money to do so. I’ve never done anything like that before or since – playing in that dangerous territory of public space. ( Jools Gilson, email correspondence, September 2017)

So now what? Now I have a rediscovered collection of photographs of an event quite some time ago, that lives on in the memory of a few of us, hopefully vividly in the minds of those who were children then. In these photographs I see and remember the power of improvisational outdoor theatre, the power that theatre gives us, performer, audience member and witness alike, to be bold, to play, to knit (even if the nuns said you couldn’t) and to dance with strangers.

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10

The voices of Cork Cartography, landscape and memory in The Knitting Map Kieran McCarthy

The Knitting Map is an amazing project – so many things rolled into one – a textile project, art installation and a community project. It is a mammoth task keeping everything going. With the community side, people need to feel rewarded and valued . . . creating an atmosphere which allows people to meet other people, and yet the knitting gets done . . . then you have the textiles . . . the technology and its unpredictability . . . the fact that it’s not a map of a place but a year . . . an art installation, developing the artistic worth of it, finding a forum for it, making connections with other places in which the craft of it can be recognized. (Interview with Elizabeth O’Dea, half/angel Company Administrator, 29 June 2005)

Meeting the Map My first encounter with The Knitting Map was a random engagement. It was not predetermined. I did not know who I was going to meet, how I would become part of the Map’s story or how it would ultimately change my work and my focus on heritage and community

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work in the ensuing ten years. I didn’t yet know how the voices and memories of the knitters would affect me in so many ways, or how they would linger with me. They still do. In early January 2005, I first encountered Sue Tector-Sands in the Cork Vision Centre, where she enthusiastically described her involvement as Project Coordinator in a Cork 2005 European Capital of Culture project called The Knitting Map. Being a curious local historian, I attended the launch phase of the Map at the 2005 headquarters on Pope’s Quay, Cork. I did not know what to expect. However, for those assembled, an adventure was just beginning; for others who had already been involved in the preliminary workshops, perhaps this was their special day. One could not but admire their warmth of spirit or their determination, belief in and openness to such a project. It was inspiring, but as a historical-geographer, also intriguing to observe. The enthusiasm of the artistic directors, Jools Gilson-Ellis and Richard Povall, was infectious. As people knitted, the chat and banter could be heard in every room; in every corner, the culture of Cork, the problems of the world, the meaning of life were all in a sense being discussed. That day, I was captured by the spell of the Map and chose to seize a new life opportunity – to create and publish an oral history project called Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks (2005), which would showcase a cross-section of multifaceted stories, memories and life experiences of those involved in The Knitting Map. What follows is an essay exploring the background and context behind creating such a project, from my research interests to the nature of the community of The Knitting Map. I had a few ideas from that first day of what my contribution to the Map might be, and what I brought to The Knitting Map was a love of my home city Cork – a love of place or a topophilia. I wrote about Cork’s local history in detail in a weekly column in the newspaper Inside Cork and had a young career built upon school workshops in heritage, historical walking tours and some three local history books. I have consistently maintained that Cork is the only Irish city that has experienced several phases of growth: from an early Christian monastery to the Viking influence, through the golden age of the Anglo-Norman walled town, the building of a new city centre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to Figure 10.1  Community spirit, from left to right, Maura O’Callaghan, Anna O’Leary, the urban renewal of today. Rose McGuire, Maura O’Connell, Nuala O’Donovan and Maureen O’Leary. Voices of The notion of Cork as a city Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, Nonsuch Publishing Ltd., 2005.

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has been and is being reinvented through the fulfilment of the ideas of its varied citizens, all striving to carve a niche for themselves in the life of the city. Such reinventions are also shown in the mix of styles in Cork’s built environment, which I began recording more systematically in the 2000s. My love of landscape and its complexities emerged through a love of photographing urban spaces, and the interactions of people with landscape, in and around 2005 when I bought a new camera. Ultimately, for me, The Knitting Map embodies a colourful landscape with all its intricate details and cultural reference points. Indeed, during the phase in which the Map was being knitted (it was a no-go area in terms of walking around on it), it became a protected and sacred landscape. In early 2005 I was just finishing up a Master of Philosophy in Historical Geography, on morphological change and Figure 10.2  A sea of colour: The craftsmanship of a section of social agency in early eighteenth-cenThe Knitting Map. Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, Nonsuch Publishing Ltd., 2005. tury Cork. The epoch was a time when the town walls of medieval Cork were taken down and the city expanded physically. New urban, social and cultural structures and new ideas for the city’s economic future emerged. My thesis was concerned with the piecemeal transformation of Cork into one of Europe’s ‘Venices of the North’  – a canal- and bridge-ridden, multilayered and complex historical city. My thesis was full of sections of old eighteenth-century maps, attempting to show an array of the representations of change from Cork’s walled town to its expanding port city topography. The word ‘representation’ was important in my research at the time. The introduction to my thesis carried the words of geographer Anngret Simms about the representation of settlements as cultural codes: “settlements are no longer looked upon as individual objects of study but in a broad sense as a text, as multi-layered, full of human intentionality, a culture code, which embodies different levels of meaning” (2000: 228). Settlement can be both medium and message, site and symbol, terrain and text. Similarly, Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1995) focuses on representations of the landscape by artists and writers through time. He begins his narrative remembering his childhood on the River Thames and its quaysides in London and reimagining the growth of the port from Roman times to the nineteenth century. The Thames, to Schama, was a line of time as well as a space itself, both sharing a tradition. In his view,

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landscape is the work of the mind, the construct of the imagination. The scenery of the mind is built up as mud from strata of myth and memory as from layers of rock. An entire landscape tradition is the product of shared culture built from a rich deposit of myths, memories and obsessions. (Schama 1995: 14) Looking at the stitch patterns of The Knitting Map up close, it too has a terrain, and a human intentionality: it offers a message and is the work of many minds and many hands. It is full of symbolism and meaning and is built from a rich deposit of memories and obsessions – it is a beautiful piece of art that not only maps the busyness of the city and its changing weather patterns but also the character, stories and voices of its citizens. The abstractness of The Knitting Map’s cartographic elements is significant. Maps by their very nature do not show the reality of place. Line spacings can represent the lie of the land – topography, water, road lengths, junctions, spot heights – but in reality, those spacings are very different from marks on a map. In rural areas, colour can be seen, such as the horizon emerging in the distance, or the changing seasons; in urban areas, there is the hustle and bustle of people coming and going, discussion and laughter, traffic jams, colour – a living settlement created by human experience. There is the everydayness of a place. Places change with the numerous generations of people who inhabit, age and live out their lives within them. The ideas of those generations adapt and transform the city.

Figures 10.3 and 10.4  A sea of colour: The craftsmanship of a section of The Knitting Map. Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, Nonsuch Publishing Ltd., 2005.

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Ideals and morals alter, evolving aspects such as fashion and architecture. New living landscapes are created, invoking new debates on culture. Topographic maps generally do not show these important debates, the everydayness of a place or the changes to a city. The Map’s originality was that it represented the realities, processes and nuances of life in Cork City through its form. I had not yet been inside the host venue for the Map’s production, St Luke’s Church, and I was excited to tour it. Cork is a city of churches and has a skyline of spires. The building was another marker of the city’s development through the ages, and its diverse architectural style represented one phase of many in Cork’s growth. It was apt to have The Knitting Map’s craftsmanship take place in a defunct church, as churches engage the visitor with the world traditions of religion and spirituality, which are very much part of the human experience and are linked to bringing people together and building community. The construction of St Luke’s Church has been attributed to several factors. In the late eighteenth century, the building of St Patrick’s Bridge and the construction of new roads leading into the northeast quadrant of the then–financially booming city brought a new lease of life to the parish of St Anne’s Church, Shandon, on the north side of the city. On this basis, it was decided that a secondary chapel to serve the area’s population growth should be built in 1837 – that of St Luke’s. This church was completely gutted by fire and destroyed. In January 1875, the second church was consecrated and opened

Figure 10.5  St Luke’s Church, Summerhill North, Cork. Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, Nonsuch Publishing Ltd., 2005.

Figure 10.6  The stained glass window in St Luke’s Church in Summerhill showing the gathering of the community. Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, Nonsuch Publishing Ltd., 2005.

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Figure 10.7  Knit-in at St Finbarre’s Cathedral in November 2004. Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, Nonsuch Publishing Ltd., 2005.

to the public on the same site as the first. Sir John Benson, who was also involved in the construction of St Patrick’s Bridge in 1852, designed it. Twelve years after its initial opening, on 9 February 1887, the second church was also completely gutted by fire and destroyed. A third church was rebuilt on the site and rededicated on 8 February 1889. So, the church’s history was all about reassembly of an important community structure, new memories, new representations and, of course, the assembly of a congregation, and these latter ideas also pervaded The Knitting Map. It assembled communities of knitters and through that assembly connected the knitters to the history of the building while bringing further narratives to the ongoing story of St Luke’s Church.

Encounters of memory It’s like you’re making history but there’s more to it than that – the whole underlying sociological perspective. It’s the breaking down of boundaries on all sorts of different levels and bringing people out of the woodwork and reconnecting them. (Interview with Kate O’Brien, 7 June 2005) I hoped initially to use The Knitting Map as a springboard from which to launch my first oral history project. I did not have a background in the ethics of oral history but I did Chapter 10  The voices of Cork    139

have the enthusiasm to try it out and to augment the skill sets of my heritage work. I deemed that local peoples’ voices were not validated enough in Cork’s history, that they were lost in the depths of the city’s core stories, which are often rolled out to describe Cork’s heritage. I had not yet encountered concepts of collective memory and how society remembers. Thus, weaving together my interests in community, topophilia, representation, cartography and mapping, urban character and place-making and context, Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks was born. The aim was to give the community of the Map an opportunity to express their individual backgrounds, their memories, experiences, wonder, dreams and hopes. But what began as an oral history project soon transformed into an artwork mapping life itself – just like The Knitting Map. The more I became an insider to the project, the more other elements of the contribution of mapping to art, heritage, knowledge and community emerged. The community of knitters I interviewed were allowed to find their own stories through a series of leading questions, but I was amazed that so many people chose to share their own personal life story without any questions asked. The frame of the stories remained The Knitting Map, which helped to elicit responses – for example, some interviews were conducted as respondents knitted, whilst others took time out to chat on the sidelines. Indeed, in many of the interviews, The Knitting Map was a catalyst for a particular story to be told. A total of sixty-five participants were interviewed and recorded. The process was pursued across three to four months and, on average, forty-five minutes to one hour was spent interviewing each participant. Many interviewees in the weeks following their interviews brought in old photos of family members to complement their story. In all, the Voices of Cork project took nine to ten months to complete and was published in November 2005 by Nonsuch Ireland, a local

Figure 10.8  Knit-in at Cork 2005 on 28 February 2004, Pope’s Quay. Valerie Byrne, Cork 2005 Project Manager, on the left is applauding the efforts. Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, Nonsuch Publishing Ltd., 2005.

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Figure 10.9  Knit-in in the RDS (Royal Dublin Society) Ballsbridge, Dublin, in November of 2004. Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, Nonsuch Publishing Ltd., 2005.

history publishing house in Dublin. By the end of the Map’s project phase in December 2005, I had forged new friendships, become one of its participants and become someone who voiced how important it is to bring communities together. The stories in Voices of Cork fell into four key sections: ‘The Knitting Map as a Revolution’, which charts the origins of the Map and impressions of knitting in Cork society in 2005; ‘Growing Up and Family Life’, which maps several stories of growing up in Cork and gives impressions of how the city has changed physically, but also socially and culturally; ‘The Architecture of Life’, which explores aspects such as marriage, death, divorce, disability and getting older and wiser to the notion of womanhood; and ‘Negotiating the Rhythms of Life’, which charts how several of The Knitting Map community members negotiated personal problems in their lives. What thus emerged in the book were insights about life and living and narratives about journeying through life. Voices of Cork became a social commentary with strikingly honest messages about human survival in Cork. For the remainder of this chapter I wish to focus on the first section, ‘The Knitting Map as a Revolution’. The term ‘revolution’ is a term I redefined to broadly mean the breaking down of social boundaries by bringing people together and creating new communities. This section gave voice to several reasons why people wished to participate in the Map and why the Map was important to them. One participant, Kate O’Brien, with a professional background in community art projects, reminded me that social boundaries between people were broken down by The Knitting Map; it did not matter where you came from and what your background was. The Knitting Map was revolutionary in this sense: Public knit-ins were to be held on the last week of every month starting with the Crawford Art Gallery, as the Map was an art project. We moved on Chapter 10  The voices of Cork    141

Figure 10.10  The Pied Piper workshop with Marian O’Sullivan on MacCurtain Street. Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, Nonsuch Publishing Ltd., 2005.

Figure 10.11  The workshop team at Shandon Craft Centre, Cork, in spring 2004. Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, Nonsuch Publishing Ltd., 2005.

to places like shopping centres, Shandon Craft Centre, trains, buses and anywhere where you wouldn’t see women knitting. The sheer curiosity of it encouraged people to watch, kids in particular – guys laughed and joked but were still curious about the stitches noting ‘my mother used to do that!’ (Interview with Kate O’Brien, 7 June 2005) To Kate, the needles were like spears crafting and transforming the fabric they spun into a narrative of a type of underground resistance. Public knit-ins, theatrical performances and gathering public support were hosted during every month of 2004, which were intended to raise the profile of the project and recruit knitters. These introduced many new supporters to the Map: Everyone began to notice that there was something happening in Cork . . . especially when Jools in costume performed in the middle of the street. People asked questions – ‘is it street theatre?’; ‘is it the showing of knit wear?’ Jools danced around like a warrior queen using needles as weapons. Before we knew it we had hundreds of names on our databases for the newsletter, which was sent out every month . . . In the Crawford, the first knit-in was amazing. That’s a revolution . . . all over Cork and it gathered momentum . . . It became a huge party with deep friendships that you can’t buy . . . it’s like the French underground. All your lines overlap. Textile artists are like the generals. There is always someone on the ground. (Interview with Kate O’Brien, 7 June 2005) Kate was proud of the multiple knit-ins, the showcasing of the project in different locations throughout the year and that The Knitting Map transformed everything physical it connected with; it empowered those who engaged with it and it broke down social boundaries. People came to knit, chatted with each other, shared their ongoing stories and life stories. Sites of play such as Cork City Gaol Heritage Centre were given new Textiles, Community and Controversy    142

Figure 10.12  Knit-in at Cork City Gaol in December 2004. Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, Nonsuch Publishing Ltd., 2005.

counter-narratives about ideas of freedom, expressiveness, tribalism and reconnection with the world, which were not ideas traditionally attached to a gaol environment: We ended 2004 [the preparation year] in the Women’s Gaol Heritage Centre and it was quite remarkable. An old gaol by its nature has negative connotations. We thought it would be great to change the whole atmosphere of the gaol. We were like a group of revolutionaries and had a meeting . . . party there. . . . It was the worst day’s weather but people came. I was in a cell but the door was open and I was knitting . . . yet the names of the women incarcerated were on the walls but you were sitting there free . . . doing something that didn’t feel like sitting very quietly in the corner knitting. I’m sitting here empowered. My knitting needles were weapons. The whole experience was militant. . . . It’s quite tribal. It’s like you’re making history but there’s more to it than that – the whole underlying sociological perspective. It’s the breaking down of boundaries on all sorts of different levels and bringing people out of the woodwork and reconnecting them. (Interview with Kate O’Brien, 7 June 2005) Enrika Bertolini Cullen, the designer of The Knitting Map’s coptic circle, also wanted to create something that brought people together to sit and knit. The circle was a timber platform on which several knitters would sit on chairs and the knitted fabric would splay outwards from this perch of sorts – it was designed from a practical Chapter 10  The voices of Cork    143

perspective, which was that it could bring the community into one area of the building to focus on knitting the Map. Enrika also felt personally connected to the space of St Luke’s Church. She had made a home in St. Columba’s Church, Tullamore, County Offaly and appreciated the design of such structures for assembling community life, the lights and colours within and the need to engage and provide for the community who pray and reflect in them: My involvement with the Map was due to the need to create a space that provided both a suitable home to the knitters and a display area for the artwork as it grew. I felt The Knitting Map could only be presented as a cascading and rippling continuity to maximise the visual impact of such a spectrum of colours and variety of texture. So a certain light was needed. In order not to interfere with the art piece created, the technology needed to be discretely incorporated into the installation and the material used for the construction of it had to be natural and unobtrusive. The coptic circle, in spite of its scale, was intended to leave that sense of intimacy that is associated with a group knitting. I grew up in a household where knitting, embroidery, sewing, crochet were a group event. It was a daily occurrence to hear the clicking of wooden needles and the chattering of women sitting in the garden in a circle and between holding up hanks and winding balls of wool. (Interview with Enrika Bertolini Cullen, 11 June 2005)

Figure 10.13  The Coptic circle as designed by Enrika Bertolini Cullen. Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, Nonsuch Publishing Ltd., 2005.

Indeed, in quieter moments, participants could wander St Luke’s Church, which is richly embellished with colour. The stained-glass windows depict gatherings of communities. Diverse themes such as faith, hope, love and trauma highlight experiences from the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. The voices of a different era echo throughout the building. In a sense, one is reminded of the community of The Knitting Map and their diverse backgrounds and life experiences. However, for all the different background of knitters of the Map, they also used the same materials to construct it. Wool was described by many Voices participants as an important material in pursuing an age-old pastime of life, but one that had passed through to the present day and was imbued with important cultural and community value  – it was a familiar cultural currency which people could connect to and a living tradition which people could participate in and preserve. Judy Attfield (2000) stresses the connection of materials to

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social relations and identity and the knock-on effects on memory production, experience and on time itself: The making and unmaking of different life stages of identity are manifested through social relations, enacted and embodied through a material world and designed in the form of things and practices in the context of personal and public space, experienced through the dimension of time and sensorially through the body . . . the material world also has effects on people, it stores memories and interrupts the flow of time to restore a sense of continuity as well as to reflect change and contain complex and apparently irreconcilable differences. (2000: 264–65) As the Voices project progressed, each participant’s story also became an important lens in showcasing and ultimately reconstructing milestones of how the art and knowledge bank of knitting developed in Ireland. The act of knitting is knowledge passed down through the generations – an inheritance of creative values attached to elements of nostalgia and folklore; it is also an aspect of creative rural Ireland, a part of the history of domestic Ireland, a link to the land through wool-processing, as well as a mechanism to counter poverty. It is a rural enterprise, a sign of a close-knit family unit, a generational process, and a personal solitary process of belonging in a community. But for all these values, these are themes that are not overtly expanded upon in the historical narrative of rural Ireland. Core ethnographic studies of how the tradition of knitting has evolved in urban and rural Ireland remain for the most part unexplored in any great depth. How knowledge is passed down about the collective development of knitting and how it is a strong living tradition remains undocumented in Irish history. Generational reasons and milestones such as the revival of the Aran sweater, the work of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association and the creation of breakaway craft groups were highlighted as important influences in many of stories of the regular knitters. Living traditions were old, in living memory ranging from thirty to one hundred years old, and filtered into the enjoyment of knitting and empowered knitters to knit, Figure 10.14  The Lord Mayor of Cork visits with the knitters at the project while especially those taking part the hard work continues in August 2005. Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, Nonsuch Publishing Ltd., 2005. in The Knitting Map.

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The generational paradigm was regularly expressed by participants – that knitting was a type of torch being passed from one generation to another. The idea of colliding traditions prevailed many participant stories. Many respondents described a sense of pride being able to participate in an age-old custom. Knitting is rooted in expressions of tradition, identity, cultural value and ownership. Many spoke about their grandparents handing on the skill of knitting, or being taught how to knit in school. For example, one regular participant, Teresa Geary, spoke about being taught to knit at school, explaining that her participation in The Knitting Map was to be recognised as having creative ability: Knitting was my passion for years. In the west of Ireland, women were judged by their creative ability. Women transformed the ten stone Odlums flour bag into shirts, tea cloths and tea cosies. Women were even judged if they could not remove or bleach out the brand name Odlums. My teacher used to knit and taught my class. It took me a while to learn the knitting techniques. My teacher had ten in her family and she was always knitting socks. I was always fascinated how you could get plain on one side and purl on the other. I got four match sticks and twine and discovered how to do the stitches. When I had my children, I knitted a garment once a week. I made all their clothes. Knitting was entertainment and satisfaction. At one time when my marriage broke up, I had nothing to live on. I knitted for a year. I barely got by and got a good job as a cook in a farmhouse. The job was time consuming and I had to give up the knitting. (Interview with Teresa Geary, 29 June 2005) Another regular participant, Mel Murphy, spoke about the timeless value of knitting, the historical value of the product and the need to uphold this skill of making, which Teresa Geary confirmed: The Knitting Map is a work of art, a record of the stitches that will have huge historical value in years to come. I think people knit because the knitter can have something to be proud of. It is a unique artwork that you can do for someone else. I would be frightened to think of my kids growing up and not knowing how to knit or sew, how to make things and not knowing the value of creativity. Knitting is a skill that could be extinct very easily. It just needs a generation not to know how to knit. (Interview with Mel Murphy, 18 July 2005) The Aran sweater was referred to frequently by participants, because its material and intricate form were mimicked by The Knitting Map as it emerged. With the Aran sweater, each stitch carries its own unique meaning and self-expression, a historic legacy from the lives of the island community many years ago. In 1891, the British government established the Congested Districts Board to help poor families to survive unemployment and food shortages (Baylis 2007: 77). The Board encouraged local people to weave and knit garments to sell. By the twentieth century this cottage industry began to take off and the Board trained knitters to create complex patterns from stitches, such as honeycomb, figure eight and double diamond. Instead of the dark-coloured, oiled wools traditionally used to make fishermen’s jerseys, the islanders experimented with soft, thick, undyed

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Figure 10.15  Aran jumper in the Irish Folklife Museum. Image courtesy of the National Museum of Ireland.

yarn. By the 1930s, Aran knitting was being sold to tourists from shops in cities like Dublin and it soon became known worldwide. Vogue Knitting published an Aran pattern in 1956 and the design became popular in America. One regular participant of The Knitting Map, Mercy Foley, related her time growing up in 1950s Ireland, learning how to knit through family interventions, playing and the large presence of knitting pattern magazines in local shops, mail order catalogues and local community hubs. She detailed the advent of the revival of the Aran sweater and associated detailed stitch patterns in knitting magazines: The early sixties saw a huge revival of the Aran sweater due to the popularity in Ireland of a folk group known as the Clancy Brothers. This band of singer/ songwriters wore their hand-knitted traditional jumpers all over the world with pride and started a new upmarket fashion trend. My most prized possession at the time was an Aran dress, which took hours of concentration to complete. Wool was very inexpensive in those days and the system of personal service in wool stores was ideal for me because I was ashamed of being colour blind

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and would not admit to it. In due course, I found a mail order catalogue, which served my purpose for many years. My confidence in completing the difficult stitch structures of Aran knitting grew and I began to knit professionally for various companies around the country. As my family got older, I thanked God that none of them had inherited my eye condition and there was no longer a shadow hanging over their creativity. One of my greatest wishes was fulfilled when my daughter, Mel, became a professional knitwear designer. (Interview with Mercy Foley, 27 June 2005) The work of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association was referred to regularly as another strong influence on encouraging participation in knitting. The association was founded in May 1910 (originally called the Society of the United Irishwomen (UI)). Its aim was to improve the standard of life in rural Ireland through education and cooperative effort. In 1935, due to political issues, the UI changed its name to the Irish Countrywomen’s Association. Around this time, the ICA also let go of just improving rural lives and began focusing on all areas of Ireland (ICA 2014). Another regular Knitting Map participant and a champion of the ICA, Ena Atkinson, spoke about the organisation reviving other crafts such as lace-making in Ireland’s regions and also the opportunity to work towards craft excellence at the craft shows of the Royal Dublin Society: In my local Irish Countrywomen’s Association, we helped revive the Borris lace, a tape lace with needle and fine thread, from County Carlow. It was successful but it was a slow and difficult technique. We thought it was necessary to keep the old crafts going. We entered some pieces in the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) and received several awards. It was a sign that it was recognised. I also like old embroidery. If you think about it, in the past, women would lace make by candlelight or sunlight . . . a great feat of craftsmanship (Interview with Ena Atkinson, 23 June 2005)

Figure 10.16  Left to right, from top to bottom, Jane Duggan, Rose Conlon, Barbara Bruen and Elsie O’Connell. Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, Nonsuch Publishing Ltd., 2005.

Less formal community gatherings were also a key element that respondents championed. The act of knitting survives in community craft clubs, many of which were set up to bring people together and cross social boundaries. Another regular participant in The Knitting Map was Sr Kathleen Hopkins who brought her craft club to participate in

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the making of the Map. She spoke at length of trying to lift many of her members from poverty, empowering them to be social, to save their money and to fundraise for charity. To her, knitting was an important forum to promote many ideas about identity and poverty intervention: I came to Cork in 1995 and I started a club in 61 Roches Buildings. It was called Sr Kathleen’s Wednesday Afternoon Club. I started and wanted to keep it as a craft club. I started with eight members and now have twenty-eight members. In the club, I run a Christmas and summer fund, so people can have a little extra. It is the purpose of saving for holiday time, which is severe on the pocket, which is important. We have a sale of work in November to raise money for charity. We keep it a small venture, as we wouldn’t be able to cope with crowds coming. We have a raffle and out of that money or donations we get, we save for our big outing in June every year. This year, we went to Millstreet Country Park, St John’s Holy Well and had our dinner in Killarney. The thought of being together makes the day so enjoyable. Togetherness makes it whole and the aims of the club are fulfilled. To know one another and to know someone in need, to help them, to give them the kind word. The ideas for the club comes from being on life’s road and you develop them as you go and as the years roll on. The ladies in my club meet once a week or we could meet in town. We could have a cup of tea and a chat. There is something to that and I hope that the ladies are getting as much out of the club as I am. We have knitted vests for those children from poorer backgrounds in the maternity wards in the city and sent clothing to Belarus. (Interview with Sr Kathleen Hopkins, 23 June 2005)

Beyond 2005 Many champions of The Knitting Map emerged over the year of its making. Where controversy may have raged outside the walls of St Luke’s Church, inside the group of knitters beavered diligently away. Indeed, as the end of 2005 approached, it became more apparent that it was the process, more so than the end result, that was important to participants. The doors of St Luke’s Church were locked on the last day; the community of knitters disbanded and went their own way. There were informal gatherings as some participants joined up to local knitting clubs, but for my part I have met less than ten of the participants again as the years have progressed. When I did meet some of the knitters, they spoke about how they enjoyed the experience and asked about the location of the Map. In June of 2006 the full Map was laid out for all to see in the Millennium Hall of Cork City Hall. Some past participants attended and expressed hope for a permanent home for the Map. Over the past ten years, whenever the European Capital of Culture 2005 is brought up in the media debates on the city, the future of The Knitting Map appears in local

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newspapers. Having been elected a local government councillor for Cork City in 2009, as well as being on the Tourism Strategic Policy Committee, I have campaigned over the years to find the Map a permanent home. However, the interest in its safekeeping and promotion at municipal level remains limited. This amazing creation deserves a home. It was a textile project, an art installation and a community project. What emerged for me is that the community aspect of knitting requires closer examination and celebration, which includes the perspectives of its participants who came together as makers, and whose voices, experiences, stories, identities and memories are also stitched into its fabric.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank The Knitting Map staff of 2005 for their kindness and support of the Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks project: Jools Gilson (Artistic Director), Richard Povall (Artistic Director), Sue Tector-Sands (Project Coordinator), Elizabeth O’Dea (Company Administrator), Kate O’Brien (Project Manager), Margaret Kennedy (Administrative Assistant), Marian O’Sullivan (Team Expert), Mel Murphy (Team Expert), Mary Norris (Team Expert), Betty Flynn (Team Expert) and Eileen Henrick (Team Expert).

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11

Puns and needles Reactions to The Knitting Map in 2005 Sarah Foster

L

ooking back at media reports from 2005, several things stand out. First, the appalling puns (‘army of knutters’ remains a personal favourite); then, the extent to which knitting as a mode of making was denigrated as something lumpenly amateurish, amusingly feminine and profoundly un-serious; and finally, despite some positive journalistic engagement with the project, the emergence of a striking contrast between how those closely involved with The Knitting Map on a day-to-day basis engaged with it on numerous levels, and how most journalists treated it with frivolity (oh, those puns . . .) or used its generous budget as a stick with which to beat the City of Culture and its personnel. This paper aims to unpack some of the debate during that year and then situate The Knitting Map in a more reflective and less reactive way, in order to appreciate its value on a number of important levels: social, artistic, political, performative.

Making the Map: Place, time and process How, exactly, did The Knitting Map represent the City of Cork as a physical entity? Based as it was on live weather and traffic data, Kieran McCarthy sees the piece in retrospect

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as ‘an abstracted picture of how the city of Cork lived, breathed and went about its daily business throughout 2005’ (McCarthy 2005b). The notion that wool-based craft should only be performed in private, and indoors, was dismissed when the Map’s participants ‘set out to dispel the myth that knitting was old-fashioned by taking it out and knitting in weird places, on buses, in public places, even on Harley Davidsons’ (Mythen 2005a). So the Map related to the city by transforming its traffic and weather data into stitch and colour; it also challenged the idea that knitting belonged solely to a domestic, female realm by physically bringing the act of knitting out of doors to unexpected places, and into the hands of men as well as women. Performances took place in and around the city: Blarney Woollen Mills, Merchant’s Quay, Crawford Gallery, Cork Vision Centre, ‘on the buses’, the Sexual Violence Centre, and out at Fota (Connolly 2005). Conjuring up personal memories of specific places through simultaneous making and chatting links space to time, as ‘The ladies who are knitting are constantly talking and remembering their own experience of a certain street, or area of city, as they knit it’ (Cronin 2005). The passing of days and weeks is represented through the changing patterns of weather and traffic logged by computers but also in a cumulative way, through the vast scale of the finished Map, its sheer heft, made up of many, many thousands of single stitches, each one formed by hands and needles. Since something so enormous required the input of many people, it remains as a visual and tangible record of a community effort – which again points to the importance of process. While the combination of computer monitors, software and knitting proved baffling to some commentators, one stalwart blithely remarked: ‘It’s not difficult at all – we have these amazing computers to show us what to do each day, and . . . it’s only knit and purl . . . What’s nice is that everyone, whether slow or fast, experienced or beginner, is welcome’ (Kerrigan 2005). And this inclusivity was highlighted by the Irish Examiner’s verdict that the piece ‘fulfils much of the remit of Cork 2005 – a community of knitters, 50 a day, will work for the year . . . [they are] a small but vital cog in a greater community’ (Kerrigan 2005). Clearly, this social embeddedness is a vital aspect of the Map, but it was often overlooked by media reports. The public discourse around the Map in 2005 seemed more preoccupied with two needles and a ball of wool as an archaic practice, best suited to Aran jumpers or colourfully patterned tea cosies. But the notion of knitting as a fusty, old-fashioned pursuit, and only for amateur hobbyists, was already outdated at that time. Sabrina Gschwandtner had launched KnitKnit (Figure 11.1) in the US three years earlier, a radical ‘zine based on ideas she later set out in a sort of craftivist manifesto, ‘Knitting Is . . .’ This ended with the stirring statement ‘knitting is a site, and it can and should be used as a form of broadcasting, just like the internet, television, or any other public media’ (Gschwandtner 2008: 278). This performative, radical take on knit and purl underlies the approach of half/angel, with their meshing of conceptual approaches, digital tools, wool and hand making. The general public is likely to regard a traditionally crafted object, channelling centuries of vernacular knowledge, as fundamentally at odds with twenty-first-century technology – yet The Knitting Map sought to bring together CCTV, computer software and an ancient method of textile fabrication. Most media commentators did not delve very deeply into just how that complex mix was either planned or executed, but those

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Figure 11.1  Sherri Wood, Comfort Room, 1998. KnitKnit, Issue 5, May 2005.

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that did responded positively: ‘The point of the exercise will be the doing as much as the end project. . . . a project will have energized and exercised the community’s imagination’ (Kerrigan 2005). The importance of process, and the idea that its making is more important than the completed object itself, underpins the whole idea (O’Riordan 2006). Cooperative hand-making has long been regarded as instinctive or unthinking, in contrast to design, art or engineering, which are seen as intellectual, yet The Knitting Map deliberately pushed these two worlds together. In May 2015, at a symposium in The Glucksman, this melding of approaches could still engender heated discussion, which then spilled out to related issues about femininity, hand-making and the performative.

Valuing the Map: Money, taste and memory Some vagueness about the amount allocated to fund The Knitting Map helped fuel media speculation as to just how many hundred thousand euros were being spent on a bit of multicoloured knitting. Eventually the air cleared, and the amount (€258,000 rather than a rumoured €400,000) was confirmed and put into context. The Irish Examiner noted at the end of 2005 that although the Map had been one of the more expensive projects that year, it had involved several thousand people; Jools Gilson is quoted as saying it was ‘great value’ and that it had employed six, and at times seven, people full-time (O’Sullivan 2005). One regular knitter saw it as ‘a way of getting involved in our city’s special year, when you might have thought that it would have [been] the province of just artists and directors and people like that’ (Kerrigan 2005). Ploughing through press cuttings, value judgements abound, and it is striking that discussion on whether the financial budget does or does not represent ‘value’ segues into personal opinions such as ‘our rectangle of shame, the Cork Calamity’ (Mythen 2005b), and ‘the much resented rug [which] does look a bit underwhelming despite its size’ (Lynch 2005). Others were more positive, calling it ‘richly patterned’ (Leland 2005) and ‘a beautiful and extraordinary object’ (McCarthy 2005b). Katie Mythen of Inside Cork is particularly incensed and links the Map’s physical appearance directly to its financial cost, as an ‘absolute Frankensteinesque creation . . . representing the utter waste one country can achieve, given enough funding and 365 days’ (Mythen 2005b). Johanna Drucker has argued that rather than using subjective value judgments when writing about art or design, we should ‘always involve, and even prioritise, the relation between a work and its production’ (Adamson 2013: 41). Good advice. But, so much discussion in print journalism about art or craft remains subjective and is still largely informed by an old value system, inherited from Modernism, which pits the useless and beautiful art object against the useful and functional craft object: ‘Back in the 1970s nothing annoyed the unreconstructed male art critics more than the use of domestic skills like knitting, along with crochet and embroidery, to disrupt the categories of high and low art and the distinction between amateur and professional artist’ (Harrod 2015: 120). The assumption in most media reports is that a giant piece of knitting just could not possibly be a work of art – made through so much simple looping of wool, by so many

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humble participants, rather than by one solitary heroic artistic genius using paint or marble. Joe McNamee felt that ‘the size and colours of the knitted “map” are impressive on first sight, but . . . there is only so much of one’s life that can be passed looking at a giant blanket’ (McNamee 2005), while one anonymous Cork businessman is quoted, rather damningly, as declaring that ‘we want the All Ireland Final in Cork, not a pack of oul’ biddies knitting’ (Lynch 2005). This connection between an innate femininity and old-fashioned crafts underlies much of the writing; Katie Mythen light-heartedly offered to make ‘a 30 foot hurley of carrot cake’ in return for City of Culture funding (Mythen 2005b). Over one hundred years ago, sociologist Georg Simmel argued that ‘aesthetic value . . . is not an integral part of the object but is rather a projection of our feelings . . . the content of the feeling is, as it were, absorbed by the object and confronts the subject as something which has autonomous significance which is inherent in the object’ (Degen 2013: 24, citing ‘Value and Money’, 1900 in Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes, 1907). It is just this subjective projection of emotion and opinion on which most journalists rely. It seems clear now that The Knitting Map project was used as a scapegoat in 2005, by those who were less than happy with the City of Culture organisation, rather than understood on its own terms; and in the following year, it was remembered as ‘a caricature for a grateful media to lampoon’ (O’Riordan 2006). After a decade of austerity in Ireland, The Knitting Map has another role to play as a striking material memory of a time when the Celtic Tiger still roared, Barack Obama was an obscure Illinois senator and Twitter did not even exist. Rather than focus on the project as symptomatic of perceived problems with the City of Culture, it should now be possible to appreciate how it sought to reinforce a sense of community, cut across generations and forge a collective identity through process and conversation. With its social embeddedness and combination of ancient handwork and twenty-first-century technology, The Knitting Map recorded a multivalent portrait of Cork and its people in abstract shapes and muted colours which can, and should, be read on many levels.

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12

Stitched up? The Knitting Map in context Joanne Turney

Introduction Knitting is considered both ubiquitous and innocuous; it is both everywhere and nothing. It is so commonplace that if not considered worthy of mention or recognition, it often renders itself ‘invisible’. Much like the weather, discussions of knitting only emerge when it becomes annoying or remarkable, raising its head above the parapet of normalcy, and thus The Knitting Map, which combined a tsunami and a ‘yarn army’, naturally created a media storm. The aftermath of this storm laid bare old cultural wounds, prejudices and ignorance, whilst concomitantly revealing the shoots of new critical growth, new models for creative community projects and new visions for the fusion of the arts, humanities and science. The Knitting Map was the storm that brought forth a wave of interest in knitting, captured a zeitgeist that craved the analogue in the digital, longed-for community, desired skill, patience, calm. It marked time, place, people and the essence of a city merely by engaging with and recording it, much like the Met Office or Met Éireann. This chapter aims to provide an overview of The Knitting Map by considering the meanings and perceptions of knitting, from women’s work to women’s leisure, from hidden to revealed. The chapter is also concerned with mapping; knitting as a ‘map’ on which key points are either inscribed or attached, but also mapping the responses to The Knitting Map at the time of its production, and on reflection in this book. The intention is to ‘finish 156

off’, tie up loose ends and for The Knitting Map to be cast off into a new life, where new biographies can be written for it. Incidentally, there are a lot of puns in this paper, not because knitting is ‘funny’, although it can be, but because the whole project is about semantics – how we understand activities and objects, people and places. Much is made of language and its usefulness and potential here as a medium of empowerment, reflection and reconsideration. As with knitting, language, and mapping, remember to expect the unexpected, even when the road is well travelled. So, this chapter is part subjective, part objective, ordinary and academic – much like the project itself – a fluid discussion of work both in and out of time. Themes for discussion are: 1) knitting as myth, 2) women and the monstrous feminine and 3) the spaces, places and boundaries of memory. All three elements are reliant on the sentimental, the expression of the subjective, the personal through experience, narrative and memory. The chapter considers The Knitting Map in time, as an idea, an activity, object and now as an artefact.

Figure 12.1  The Knitting Map exhibition (Detail) at Millennium Hall in June 2006. half/angel.

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Of maps and mapping: Lines of contour and communication Maps communicate. They are not static, but fluid, developing, morphing and changing with the rhythms of a dynamic landscape. They chart progress, negotiate spaces and offer routes to be followed, ignored or challenged. Knitting too is a map – a single yarn that loops its way through complexities of patterns, creating strength row after row; a yarn that connects, slips (sometimes) through the fingers, and one that can easily be unravelled with just one tug. Maps lay claim to territories and by association dictate modes of thought and behaviour, but also represent the endeavours of those who have made them. Moving with time, emerging, growing, and decreasing, building new from the old, maps and knitting trace and bear witness to those who went before – building on building, making on made, knitting on knitted. The map is never complete, nor the outcome fully known, but the journey establishes narratives, paths, trails of thought, memories and experiences, that are both collectively and individually traversed. It is this journey that was so significant for The Knitting Map, incorporating testimony collected and published in Kieran McCarthy’s Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks (2005); from inception, to process, completion, or the end of the year’s duration, knitting lived experience with process, and the essence of place and space into threads of narratives – literal and metaphorical ‘yarns’ that echoed the contours of Cork. As Róisín O’Gorman notes in this book, maps are not “innocent markers of geography but players in the process of controlling and occupying space” (2019: 99). So too, knitters. Knitters do not simply knit; they make things, yes, but they also make narratives of time spent, of mental space, of taste, of family, of pleasure, leisure, necessity, luxury and thrift. They can also be political and furtive, occupying the traditional notion of craft as ‘craftiness’ or secrecy, as in US Civil War knitting circles, or as seen in fictional characters such as Madame Defarge and Miss Marple. They can make political statements, drawing attention to socially deprived places and marginalised people (as The Knitting Map did on many occasions). Knitting is a thread, which can be utilised and interpreted as any thread; a biography, a link, a connection, communication, a destination, a journey, a contour on a map. It is fair to say that knitting and any repetitive craft work loosens the tongue (from knitting circles to ‘stitch and bitch’), and this might be considered a stereotypical trait associated with ‘gossipy women’, as terms such as ‘bitch’ imply. However, such a connection has distinct historical imperatives stemming from preindustrial craftwork through to ‘underground’ political movements, which emphasise that group participation in knitting is certainly more than just mindless chatter. For example, as a cottage industry, knitting (like weaving and other textile crafts) would be undertaken within the home and alongside other domestic tasks such as childminding. The natural rhythm of repetitive crafts practice is akin to the heartbeat, a metronome of needles, by which poems and stories were told as a means of entertainment. Likewise, the development of seemingly innocuous knitting circles during the American Civil War facilitated the manufacture and

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storage of uniforms and supplies, undetected, on an unprecedented scale (Wills 2007: 15–21). These historical examples predate mass literacy and, as a consequence, highlight the significance of craftwork in making meaning as a bodily, rhythmic, repetitive activity, that has the potential to challenge, even subvert, the status quo. Never trust a stereotype. There may be no party political1 impetus for contemporary knitting groups, but the heritage of communal crafting continues, providing a safe space for sharing problems or issues amongst like-minded people. Frequently, participants are women, and often women who feel powerless, socially marginalised and are therefore without a voice, for example, the elderly, although this is by no means the only group involved. Participation is not merely about airing one’s opinions, although this may be considered good for the soul, but about a practical activity that diverts from the self (knitting something for someone). Here knitting might be considered ‘un-wasteful’, as time is not spent on the self or in wallowing in one’s own emotional outlook.2 Nonetheless, the combination of a shared pastime that encourages conversation, even discussion, via its physical and rhythmic elements when undertaken in a group, does create a support network, whether this is the intention or not. Knitting is naturally a ‘net-work’, a strong fabric made from holes, and therefore it seems poetically apt to consider those who participate as supporters, untangling problems and picking up dropped stitches. Knitting too is a metaphorical practice; like many textile crafts, it has a linguistic connection to life narratives, especially those of women. For example, we live in ‘tight knit’ communities, we ‘weave’ webs of deceit or ‘embroider’ the truth. We may even practice witchcraft. But knitting, a fabric made from a single thread, both strong and easily unravelled, is most easily aligned with biography. Lives purport to have a linearity, indeed we only have one but, like knitted stitches, lives are formed from loops, knots, tangled messes, of going forwards and backwards, and, as we grow, evidence our dropped stitches, tension and unravelling. It seems appropriate then, to consider knitting as a form of communication, of sharing, but also of marking a life narrative, and this was evidenced in Kieran McCarthy’s Voices of Cork (2005), which offers a platform for the makers of The Knitting Map to speak. In the vast majority of textile practices, makers are unnamed, invisible, mute. Their labours are considered ‘domestic’, too ‘manual’ and therefore they are sidelined by the cerebral ‘artist’ or ‘creative’ designer or ‘well known’ brand or ‘wealthy’ manufacturer (all masculine and dominant traits) and are thus marginalised beyond recognition and representation and erased from the picture. Here though, McCarthy puts makers at the forefront, prioritising their lives and contribution, not merely to the artwork (although this is significant), but to Cork. Makers’ testimonies are presented thematically, each of which offers an insight into the biography of place. These testimonies belong to the makers of The Knitting Map, who are also the makers of Cork. McCarthy’s book offered genuine, heartfelt testimony, which was to become a living document for future generations. This endeavour was by no means insignificant. Testimony ranged from instructive to uplifting to emotionally draining; the whole gamut of life experience was marked in print, solidifying and containing the very personal, ephemeral feeling expressed through spoken word for public consumption. From general autobiography to profound observation (“When I was living at home, I belonged to everybody and

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did not see myself as my own person” [Margaret Kennedy, qtd. in McCarthy 2005: 81]), narratives emerged, adding text and contextualising the material object of their endeavours: The Knitting Map. Conversely, the reportage about The Knitting Map was unexpected and shocking. That such a politically and locally specific and significant project, one which combined old and new technology so ably and succinctly, one which was in time, of time and speaking to the future, could be derided so openly, could invoke enough bile to sour even the sourest of grapes (and there were many), was more than saddening. From a standpoint of stereotyping, the reportage spoke of value, not merely of the distribution of funds (although this did form the central talking point and often a guise for deeper, unspoken political issues), but of who and what was valuable within the city and the wider world.

Understanding knitting The traditional semantics of knitting are well worn and are so much part of daily life they almost belie description. Nonetheless, these are: • Woolly • Domestic/hand-made • Old-fashioned • Ill-fitting • Women – old women, i.e., knitted by nanas • Unnecessary – why knit when you can buy? • Thrifty – a badge of poverty • Itchy/uncomfortable • Not me We might also add sentimental themes such as familial bonding (Miller 2001), love (Turney 2014: 21–30), philanthropy (Grant 2014) as well as dexterity and discipline developed through skill, sitting still and learning rules (Macdonald 2010), like learning a sport and a language at the same time, or as a means of making ‘pin’ or ‘needle’ money, of being able to make a bit of money, but not too much, and certainly not enough to compete in business or the marketplace (Walkley 1981: 3; Alexander 2003; Blackburn 2013: 23). We might also add to the mix notions of leisure (Deem 1982: 29–46; Wills 2007: 16–21) and therapy (Duffy 2007: 67–83), as knitting is frequently considered to be something that one undertakes when one is not well, or is unable to work (Zandy 2004: 73). Yet knitting frequently has a practical outcome, such as sweaters and other woolly clothing, dishcloths or scourers, bazaar novelties or charitable donations (Strawn 2011: 214) and, if you believe the adverts on television, Shreddies (“knitted by nanas”). Regardless of this emphasis on utility, knitting has, since the advent of industrialisation (and like many crafts) been beaten with the ‘outside of culture’, outside of fashion and merely a joke, stick (or needle . . .).

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What is exacerbated by these terms, regardless of recent attempts to ‘empower’ the iconology and iconography of the crafts in general, is oppositional to that which is generally culturally valued. For example, to describe knitters as ‘nanas’ or ‘’oul biddies’ is to articulate the social ordering principle that attributes power, status and identity to a group, by which a person is not valued by how old they are, but by how young they are not (Woodward, qtd. in Twigg 2013: 33). This was expressed in some of the knitters’ testimonies, where a lack of respect for one’s elders was cause for concern that went beyond the point of manners (seen in examples such as Margaret Kingston’s testimony, in McCarthy 2005: 77). Age here is seen as hierarchical, and particularly in relation to women; an afternoon watching TV advertising is enough to confirm this, with products offering magical turn-back-time, fountain-of-youth qualities that will conceal or detract from the shame of ageing. Such semiotic referencing instantly alienates knitting from the mainstream, despite campaigns to make knitting ‘hip’ (Swartz 2002). The chapters in this book have outlined, both directly and indirectly, the ‘women problem’ and responses to it, particularly when the invisible becomes visible – when women, sidelined from the media’s glittering discourse of daily life, join forces, and are blinded by the spotlight. In this book, Lucy Lippard links this to a whole host of feminist projects that have aimed to bring women together as a collective, while Sarah Foster considers the media trivialisation of women’s creative practice in response to The Knitting Map. Foster uncovers the persistence of stereotyping, not merely of knitting, but possibly more seriously, the cultural trivialisation that has contributed to the ‘invisibility’ of specific groups of women. Furthermore, as Nicola Moffat, citing Denis Wood (2010: 33), notes “the map affirms the state, the state affirms the map” and thus The Knitting Map underlined and confirmed the dominant ideology that trivialises women, women who knit and all knitted objects that exist outside of the market. Foster too considers the role of the fine and not-fine arts and the pervasiveness of patriarchal hierarchies that value exclusivity and distance, or masculine interests (the All Ireland final) over the potential to give voice to those who have none. It seems that terms such as community, embeddedness and inclusivity, were, by the media at least, dismissed as frivolous, trite, ‘impoverished’ and generally embarrassing. It is indeed easy to lampoon those with little social and political power, but such scapegoating is highly revealing, diverting attention from key and more politically sensitive issues, as Foster uncovers. As many contributors to this book recognise (Barkun, Foster, Lippard), media discourse surrounding The Knitting Map was seriously outdated, not merely in its political incorrectness, but in its inability to consider the zeitgeist and emergent trends in what has been described as ‘knitting’s new wave’ (Gschwandtner 2007). In some of the media critique of The Knitting Map, the stereotypes exceeded any concept of knitting as the new yoga, the new black or the next new best thing, concluding that knitting’s ‘cool’ was reliant on ‘buzzwords’ that were merely inconsequential trends, ads with no sense of longevity or intrinsic value: “Knitting? A map? Of the city? Culture? I know knitting is the new rock and roll, but . . . art?” (O’Sullivan 2004). Such dismissive reporting, one that questions the use of knitting, culture and art in the same sentence, emphasises in both tone and language the apparent ridiculousness of the potential for knitting to have

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Figure 12.2  Vintage balaclava knitting pattern. Image courtesy of the Knitting Reference Library, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton Library, UK.

Figure 12.3  ‘Cosy Wear for Older Folk’ vintage knitting pattern. Image courtesy of the Knitting Reference Library, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton Library, UK.

any value at all. Of course, knitting has cultural value: it has history, it demonstrates all manner of exemplar of human endeavour, but it is also a binary process, a code that is fundamental to mathematics, science, computing3 and music (Robertson 2007: 209–20). Indeed, The Knitting Map seemed to bridge the paradox of human skill ‘versus’ scientific evidence (the hand on the needles/the eye in the ‘sky’), creating new ways of seeing, understanding and experiencing by revealing the ubiquitous and mundane as beautiful and passionate: “It is not about the result; it is about the process” (Gilson-Ellis, qtd. in Roederer 2005). From nothing comes something. From one step or stitch the journey begins. Connections are made, relationships negotiated, paths are forged. And so the threads of revolution were crafted in Project Coordinator Kate O’Brien’s hand-written invitation – lines of ink on fibrous paper, joining letters into words – intimately reaching out to mute voices with something to say, to skilled fingers with need for activity. The journey had begun. And the personal (through relationships and the touch of the maker) was to touch communities, the interested and disinterested, uncovering what had been hidden or left under-utilised, ignored or mute. In Voices of Cork, Maureen McGrath observed the finished product “like someone looking out of a plane looking down at fields” (qtd. in McCarthy 2005: 32). Here, the big picture was evidenced, open to interpretation through science and sentiment and then recorded, charted and knitted for a whole year. The scope, scale and presentation

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of the map is not merely a testimony to those who participated (although, of course, this is fundamental), it is also a metaphor for contemporary life: we need to look to ourselves, our communities, to see the smallness of our own concerns in relation to the rich pattern of our environment. In Voices of Cork, we hear minute stories; the world is in microcosm, but each of these fragments contributes to the bigger picture, creating a whole, just as The Knitting Map does. The present is built on the past, on memories of harder, simpler or happier times, times that have been witnessed and survived. Indeed, the inclusion of biographical testimony creates a space in which, like mapping, narratives based on memory and an understanding of self can be negotiated. What one remembers is inextricably linked to how one perceives oneself now within larger cultural frameworks (Fivush and Hayden 2003: viii) and therefore what one remembers ‘truthfully’ is comparative, based on subjective interpretations of complex experiences of a selective enmeshing of the past with the present, revisited, remembered and renegotiated.4 With this in mind, it is possible to consider the construction of self as a potentially linear narrative which affirms (in this case) a sense of belonging to a place: these were indeed voices of Cork. So, tales of childhood, of picnics, train/tram journeys, the outdoors – gardens, farms, locally produced food and being engaged in either production or harvesting (salmon, potatoes, cabbage, apples, blackberries, jam) – school days, businesses, shops, activities (such as rationing), all bear witness to a sense that things were done differently in the past. In other words, dealing with hardship, resourcefulness, simplicity, of playing games/sports (or playing fair), all emphasise belonging, but essentially belonging to a different time, perhaps a time in which respondents were more valued or more able to ‘be themselves’, whilst also demonstrating a distance from ‘there’ to ‘here’, a subtext of dissatisfaction with the present, a nostalgia for that which is lost, or a resource left untapped: “Will they have good childhood memories when they grow up?” (Ann Ralph, qtd. in McCarthy 2005: 40). One might consider this as an out-of-time meander down memory lane, a rejection of what is vibrant and now. Indeed, the semantics of knitting were used in the media as much to lampoon the project, a scapegoat representative of a wider dissatisfaction and controversy, as McCarthy’s book celebrated them. It was an easy site of derision: any artwork that is funded seems to be compared, in terms of cost/funding at least, with a need for ‘useful’ objects/services (usually healthcare). It appeared to be “an absolute Frankensteinesque creation” and a “rectangle of shame” (Mythen 2005), which is indicative of the apparent pointlessness, purposelessness and futility of the apportioning of funds from Europe and institutions closer to home. One might consider this outcry of cynicism as an extension of a more general dissatisfaction at the City of Culture programme of events (Lynch 2005: 25), which include comparisons made between The Knitting Map, and the possibility of hosting the All Ireland Final in Cork (I have no idea what this is, but I assume it involves men, sweat and mud). Moreover, this enhances a gendered perspective of systems of cultural value that simultaneously dismisses the ‘idea’ of knitting in this context per se. And with making comes unmaking. Is there a world beyond these memories, experiences and cultures? A world that is unknown, influenced beyond family, city and nation, beyond the ‘simple’, complex, unwieldy and perhaps, frightening and hostile? One knitter

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Figure 12.4  Mustard honeycomb, The Knitting Map (Detail). half/angel.

comments “I grew up with all my neighbour’s kids playing with me, but many of them have changed so much. Some of them have grown into murderers, drug dealers and rapists” (Rachel O’Mahony, qtd. in McCarthy 2005: 59), and another is quoted as saying “You meet people who don’t have the same goal, people pulling against each other” (Elizabeth O’Dea, qtd. in McCarthy 2005: 79). Both underline a loss of the memory of community. It seemed knitters had something to say, something dangerous and political: “Corrupt is a word I’m using for Ireland at the moment, corrupt from the top down. I think there is much misdoings going on in hierarchical orders of people. Our younger generation are being disillusioned by the people they should be looking up to” (Una Long, in McCarthy 2005: 73); and, “I get angry when I think of my politicians, the church – what people can get away with” (Margaret Kingston, qtd. in McCarthy 2005: 77). Is this merely throw-away, busy-body chat, valueless “knit and natter” (Macdonald 1995: 54-6) or is this opinion, discussion and talk? Community and what that means seemed important for those working on The Knitting Map; tensions are frayed, and an underlying worry that we may well be products of our environment simmers within the testimony, emerging as remembered possibilities that might well be revisited, if not by the respondent, then by others. Barbara Bruen remembered: “I had great freedom. I could come and go. If I wanted to be on my own, I could go down the field alone with just the cows. I loved the nature of it” (qtd. in McCarthy 2005: 65). A similar sentiment was also indicated by Lionel Powell: “The free things here are priceless. You are so close to the sea that you can tap into it at any level canoeing to yachting. The countryside is free. I grew up on the edge of that, tapping into the resources” (qtd. in McCarthy 2005: 108). As McCarthy notes “The stories reflect change, perhaps within the more emotional and spiritual landscape” (2005: 15),

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and I would suggest that the knitting responses, the practice and testimony, created a mythologised landscape that knits time, space, emotion and expectation, fusing the real with the imagined, the anticipated with the feared. At the core of this discussion is the renegotiation of boundaries and the possibility of boundaries with no bounds. Such a suggestion infers that one cannot be contained, restrained or held within a system of representation or classification against one’s will, thus posing a threat to the status quo. As such a force, the unyielding Knitting Map can be understood as indicative of the monstrous feminine. This analogy is pertinent as it emphasises the female body as uncontrollable and horrific; here, The Knitting Map is a body of ‘feminine’ work, which is without form, is unexpected, boundless, and, as the press cuttings allude, an abomination, a Figure 12.5  Golden Hands vintage magazine cover. Image courtesy horror, which, even to this day, has yet to of the Knitting Reference Library, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton Library, UK. find an institutional home. The Knitting Map became considered (in the press at least) as equally monstrous; with reports and encounters eliciting horror, whilst the project maintained a public interest, a fascination, that perpetuated commentary. The unpredictable, out of or beyond-control woman who distorts and subverts the boundaries of sex, The Knitting Map seemingly had no end, no set aesthetic or physical structure, growing and spilling over as a response to the pleasure of making, of taking part, regardless of criticism, derision and scorn. This is indeed a performance of femininity (Ussher 2006: 1): it bore witness to the power of the makers, predominantly women, signified not just by making, but the decision to hang it centrally and publicly on completion. Indeed, even after ten years, The Knitting Map stirs passions and anxieties and sours grapes.

The map is not what is there In the introduction to McCarthy’s Voices of Cork, The Knitting Map is described as “an abstracted picture of how the city of Cork lived, breathed and went about its daily business throughout 2005” (2005: 14) and, as such, combined with its articulation through the ‘holes’ of knit, created expressions of dérive the Situationists could only have dreamed

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about. The act of wandering, of charting one’s own path and creating one’s own map of a city, is described by Guy Debord as [t]he sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places – all this seems to be neglected. (Debord 1955: 23) Debord’s observation could be used to understand the significance and wider value of The Knitting Map, where the city of Cork and knitting are both seemingly understood by the inhabitants. Both city and activity are built on maps (patterns) that are recognisable. They both offer ways in which space and practice can be negotiated by way of the directions they offer. But neither map nor pattern defines what either is, because both are instructions of the ‘path of least resistance’; true understanding of place, craft and environment comes when one moves away from the map, when one makes one’s own path, one’s own pattern. The Knitting Map achieved this by constructing and navigating the city in a new way, through a new medium, based on the experience of being in the city (weather and traffic). There is no doubt of the poetic underpinning of the project, which combined the physical engagement in the natural and man-made fluidity of the city through making with a technological spectator/spectre that communicated the patterns of life as an extension of the seasons, elements and the movement of citizens in real time. This was the fusion of the analogue and digital, the real, the lived, the experienced, with the distant voyeur of technology, watching, interpreting and dictating like a satellite anthropologist negotiating systems of being from a position on the margins. Like an anthropological study, The Knitting Map was, like textiles and lives, multilayered, with each stitch, each day and each viewing uncovering the depth of Cork and her people (complexity on complexity), unpicking lives, secrets and experiences, alongside the showcasing of skill, community, kinship and diversity, quietly waiting for these voices to be heard, the individual, the group, the collective and the city: “[g]etting somewhere is always a conundrum of analysis and surprise, rain and strange forks in the road cloud one’s vision as a matter of course. We all lose our way even when we arrive safely in good time” (Gilson 2012: 11). In the spirit of dérive, The Knitting Map demonstrated how ordinary activities could be renegotiated by extraordinary means to revalourise the mundane. Of course, when one digs beneath the surface, one is not always sure what will be found, so such an endeavour is less of a fact-finding mission and more of a poke at the hornet’s nest. What has been uncovered can never be rehidden. Jools Gilson notes “[p]oetically and politically it was a work that sought to rework the urban territory of matter and meaning; knitting was used as something monumental  – an abstract cartography of Cork generated by the city itself and its weather, and knitted every day for a year” (2012: 10). The political agenda must come, if not wholly, in part,

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from the media of choice, so that it is impossible to avoid. To use knitting, whether politically correct or not, is to summon the ghosts of generations of domestic creativity, women’s work, myths of the feminine, the mundane or everyday, that specifically in Ireland are representative of a particular type of ordered, skilled craftwork  – a good womanliness  – venerated and rewarded by the RDS (Royal Dublin Society). This aspect of the commentary seems indicative of 1) women’s pride in their abilities, which is to be supported and congratulated, but also, and more sinisterly, perhaps 2) a ‘suffer and be still’ mentality, in which women’s creativity has been restricted by the rules of a governing committee. Indeed, the combination of a dictating CCTV (technology = masculine) and an everyday non-art creative practice Figure 12.6  Vintage knitting pattern. Image courtesy of the Knitting Reference Library, Winchester School of Art, University of Souththat follows patterns such as knitting ampton Library, UK. (feminine) introduces a gender bias to the project by association. Even more political is the association of knitting (a thrift craft) with poorer, working-class members of society. Gilson continues: to make such a gesture using feminine and female labour aspired to re-work the relationship between femininity and power in an Irish context: it gave cartographic authority to working-class older women from Cork, for a year . . . The Knitting Map allowed the prevailing cultural peripherality of middle-aged women to make a collectively original and beautiful thing, and in doing so re-mapped their own apparently tangential geography. (2012: 10) Such a symbolic redistribution of power, albeit not an expression of ‘actual’ power, was bound to be contentious. These women have no cultural currency, nor do they have financial clout (an issue that arose continually in the criticism of the project – these were volunteers! They weren’t getting paid!), and as such cannot be seen as glamorous, ‘sexy’ or newsworthy in a non-gendered, classless way. Of course, such proclamations of ‘worth’ can equally be understood as rhetorical as well as semantic: when we ask what something is ‘worth’, we are usually asking what its financial value is. So questions such as “what is this project ‘worth’?” imply “what is knitting worth?” and, more importantly, “what are the participants ‘worth?’”5

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Conclusion “Maps don’t merely represent space, they shape arguments, they set discursive boundaries and identify objects to be considered” (Institute for Applied Autonomy 2008). If you make your own map, you are expressing and articulating what is personally significant, marking that which requires marking. You are making your own boundaries and establishing parameters of value and worth. You are marking your territory, framing and positioning yourself and your belief system and creating narratives that are fluid and significant in equal measure. Here, the map-maker and the knitter are political agitators, quietly rebellious, getting on with the task in hand, recording and retracing, remaking the steps of a city, much like a modern-day Madame Defarge. Knitting is a journey; it has a start and an end. It can be measured and the distance travelled calculated, rationalised and documented; we can tell how far it is from ‘there’ to ‘here’. It can be mapped, redrawn and reworked through the creation of a pattern, which can be followed, deviated from or ignored. One can add one’s own ‘touches’, which may be stylistic or merely an indication of the imperfection of the hand. We may learn as we go, we may use it to fill time – the knitted stitches reminiscent of the gaps in our life – we may use it as a means of recovery if we succumb to those holes or life pitfalls or start to unravel. I believe that, however small, making does make meaning  – it punctuates life narratives, simultaneously offering souvenirs of the process and of time spent. It is evidence of life, of endeavour, of skill. It is evidence of the journey. The Knitting Map’s journey is now thirteen years in the making. In that time, knitting has been popularised, ‘celebrified’ (Parkins 2004: 25–441) and even gentrified. Now a sign of hipster-ish lifestyle, politics that encompass ‘slow’ living (Parkins 2006) and an acceptably ‘cool’ consumer knowingness that challenges mass manufacture and capitalism per se, knitting offers access to sustainability (at a price) and product narratives that express provenance (we know the name of the animal who produced our Figure 12.7  Weldon’s Knitted & Crochet Toys. Image courtesy of yarn, the farm where they live and so the Knitting Reference Library, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton Library, UK. on). Similarly, knitting as art is almost

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accepted (it’s still called ‘textile art’, but this is nonetheless a breakthrough), and yarn bombing, once a shocking, politically charged yet amusing addition to the urban environment, is now nothing more than a woolly blight on the facades of high streets up and down the country. So, knitting has become more visible, possibly even more acceptable, although the old stereotypes still stand and The Knitting Map was very much part of this movement towards acceptability. However, unlike the sagging strings of mismatched bunting adorning lampposts  – the debris of a yarn bomb – which offer hollow acknowledgement to activism and the pioneers of knitting, art and environment, The Knitting Map leaves a memory of hope, of achievement, of collectivism, performance, the marriage of art and industry, the rational and Figure 12.8  Travelling Set. Image courtesy of the Knitting Reference Library, the irrational, the public and the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton Library, UK. private and the celebrated and the silenced. The Knitting Map bridged boundaries that hitherto had been cultural opposites, divided by conceptions of high and low artistic forms, whilst its interdisciplinarity offered an inclusivity that touched lives beyond the city, nation and continent. For something so all-embracing, so innocuous, it certainly created a lot of hostility, which, on the one hand, could be interpreted as a general dissatisfaction with the politics and management of the European City of Culture award, but, on the other (and this is more problematic), could be due to the valourisation of The Knitting Map as a project. The marginalisation and continued negation of a project that met, even exceeded, its set aims raises serious questions about how women and women’s work is valued not just in Ireland in 2005, but in the arts in general. The Knitting Map, regardless of its inclusivity and its ubiquity (on the streets, in the media) opened a political Pandora’s box that still has not been fully addressed. It is this legacy that will secure its future.

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13

Alchemy for beginners The Knitting Map and other primes Richard Povall

Unravelling In so many ways The Knitting Map was for me a way-marker, a capstone, a point of branching, a departure. It is our life circumstances, in the end, that often overcome and overwhelm, just as it is the practicalities of making that overcome (but hopefully do not overwhelm) the poetic gesture, the poetic breath of life that brings art into being. This work became an endpoint in what had been an exceptional pairing of minds. For more than a decade I had made work with Jools Gilson that made my heart sing. It was a moment in my life where I could make technology soar – a moment, too, in the history of digital art that felt emergent, and that was already falling by the time we made this work together. Together, in the 1990s, we had been working at the forefront of the field of practice clumsily called ‘dance-tech’. The discourse here was all about capture, about using a variety of technologies to read and analyse – but rarely, it seemed to me, to understand – the movement of bodies on a stage. We spent time in residence at STEIM in Amsterdam and at the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada, working on and developing our particular contribution to this field of practice. We seemed to be somewhat out on a limb, focusing our practice not on the technology itself but on clarifying relationships and interconnections between movement, gesture, sound and language. 170

Figure 13.1  Jools Gilson, performance from The Secret Project at Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, September 1999. half/angel.

Figure 13.2  Performance still from The Secret Project, co-produced by Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada and Firkin Crane, Cork, Ireland, September 1999. half/angel.

Computing power was limited and struggled with the gushing streams of data available from our video-based motion capture system. My own struggle was not (as with most) the analysis of those seemingly limitless streams of data, but in learning how much to reject without losing the essence – the quintessence perhaps – of the ephemeral gesture. This, together with our experimentation with the gesture of live and prerecorded spoken poetic language, made our work unique. In time, we moved on, having felt but not consciously expressed that we had reached an end-point after The Secret Project in the late 1990s. The technology – the ability to capture and analyse a body in motion – was becoming increasingly sophisticated; the discourse was not. I still occasionally delve into this world (like all such worlds it comes with its closed societies and secret language) and find to my surprise that the discourse still hasn’t moved on. The questions being asked – about how machines read and interpret the body in motion – on the whole remain as unsophisticated and focused on the surface as always. What is largely missing is a phenomenological response to movement, any understanding of emotional power, of beauty, of poetics, of gentleness, of tears – of meaning. There remains much talk about ‘embodied knowledge’ without, it seems to me, any real understanding of either ‘body’ or ‘knowledge’. But with rare exceptions there seems little crossover between this world and somatic research and Spinoza’s mind and body (Eakin 2003) – indeed these worlds seem to be imprisoned within the dimensional limitations of Cartesian territories and dimensional maps: There is a time to express emotion, and a time to forbear; a time to sense what others are feeling and a time to ignore feelings. In every time, we need a balance, and this balance is missing in computing. Designers of future computing can continue with the development of computers that ignore emotions, or they can take the risk of making machines that recognize emotions, communicate them, and perhaps even “have” them, at least in the Chapter 13  Alchemy for beginners: The Knitting Map and other primes    171

ways in which emotions aid in intelligent interaction and decision making. (Picard 2003: 64)

Capturing the city Come 2003 and an invitation to pitch ideas to the curators and organisers of Cork 2005 European City of Culture. As with all half/angel projects, The Knitting Map began as a poetic dream: a gesture, a poetic image drawn in an imaginative space. Such dreams had conjured up magic sensing ‘beads’ that lived in the soil nestling up to and having conversations with roots and plants; cyborgian friends whose understanding of land and creative ability with language was as great as our own; luscious musical composition devices that could create instantly seductive music fully in sympathy with and fully cognisant of the movement and poetic gestures of a group of dancers. But this was a different dream – one that lasted fairy-tale-like for a year, or a generation, or a hundred years. Through magical technologies our knitters, happily locked in their tower, knit a story that dreams and weaves the narrative of the city for an entire year, which, like Rapunzel’s golden hair, slowly emerges from the tower to reveal its tale, share the secret knowledge of the city and grant access to the magic circle of knitters. The dream told of a satellite,1 hovering over Cork City throughout 2005 and sharing its knowledges so that the essence of the city during its years of international elevation could be translated into a map and then into a vast knitted tapestry. And, like so many of the dreams woven and told by Jools, it seduced, caught the imagination and captured the most pragmatic of souls.

Translation If all such dreams were the one percent inspiration (Rosanoff 1932: 406), translating the gesture into reality was fraught with its usual difficulty. To this point, our working process had been a highly collaborative one: working apart, then coming together to test, refine, discard, develop. In a performative context, this iterative process is commonplace: our particular form of collaboration relied absolutely on such processes to work. But now, we were not capturing the movement of a single dancer, or a group of dancers, but an entire city. Whatever the technology was to be, there would be small chance here for knowledge-building through iterative rehearsal and experimentation. For while the city may be a living thing, it is an abstract concept, unable to speak or respond intelligently. For the first time, we included a dumb participant in what was normally a complex web of intelligent agents all responding to one another. The translation tool for the poetic machine – the satellite watching benignly over the entire city and passing on its knowledge with a generosity of spirit and a smiling face – simply didn’t exist outside of secret military installations. Debate about private access to space has been a fundamental question for decades (US Congress 1984: 36) but, as in so Textiles, Community and Controversy    172

Figure 13.3  Hardware from The Knitting Map, St Luke’s Church, Cork, Ireland, 2005. half/angel.

many areas that were once exclusively state-owned and state-driven, private ownership is becoming a reality and nowhere more so that in that great inventor of the capitalist machine, the United States. Today satellite launches by private companies are becoming if not commonplace then not extraordinary, and there have been experiments with cheap, coffee-cup-sized satellites controllable by your mobile phone (Finlay 2012); however, in 2005 there was not even the remotest possibility of actually using satellite technology as our observing eye. The answer was a simple but pragmatic one. The question at hand was how to sample the emotional temperature, the ‘feeling’ of the city at any given moment. Two things often have more effect on human affect than any other: what the weather is like and how easy (or otherwise) it is to get about, particularly in this small city still very much in the grip of the developers and improvers during the heady days of the Celtic Tiger. Weather is a simple thing to capture: a professional weather station (in our case, the Davis Vantage Pro) can capture all of the essential elements of weather that together tell the story of how the weather feels: temperature, humidity, rainfall, UV and solar radiation (light) and wind speed and direction. All these data did not tell us ‘what weather means’ but instead determined “the relations among the measurable qualities” to provide a “coherence” (Kagan 1984: 155). So far, so simple. Trying to sample the busyness of a city could only be done piecemeal (given the absence of the all-seeing satellite eye). Choosing five key sites in the city, we mounted Chapter 13  Alchemy for beginners: The Knitting Map and other primes    173

CCTV cameras that looked at the degree of movement – cars, people – and the density of cars and people correlated with quantities of motion. Lack of both density and motion sent a clear message of a calm, quiet place; plenty of moving traffic signalled a city going about its business; a great density of traffic with little movement signalled a city in a state of frustration and gridlock – a not uncommon occurrence at certain times of day within the heart of this small, over-burdened city. Raw data rarely tells a story without interpretation and it was here that we could draw on the decade or more of our work with sensing technologies. Extrapolation and inference are the keys – gaining an understanding of what is being observed and translating that understanding into a meaningful output. In the end, the calculus was simple: a quiet calm city produced relatively plain stitches, with stitches and patterns becoming more complex as the city’s busyness waxed and waned. A benign weather pattern translated into benign colours, moving towards brighter blues and purples as the storm clouds gathered. And, unlike our stage work, this data needed averaging over much longer time scales. Knitting, particularly that undertaken by volunteers or learners, takes time to produce a visible pattern – a row of one stitch followed by a row of a different stitch would mean nothing visually. In the end, we chose to average information from a day’s worth of gathered data, so that the weather and busy-pattern of a Tuesday (for example) would be knitted the next day, on Wednesday.

The sea The emergence of the Map was, of course, gradual. The weather was uncooperative, remaining largely bland, grey and muted for much of the year. Summer wasn’t, particularly. Knitters complained of boredom. This was so utterly different from our performance work, where these translations that we had worked on for so many years had more instant outputs. A system we had refined for real-time spellings of body knowledge had to be understood in the course of hours, not milliseconds; weeks and months, not days. But eventually, there it was. The poetic gesture realised lay there on the floor of the basement of the disused church, itself a symbol of the changing and increasingly deconsecrated face of Cork, of Ireland, its people, modernity. It had taken an at times painful and challenging community effort, a reinvention of half/angel as a community arts project, the creation of a social space that ultimately brought together thousands of knitters from across the world – arguably, the primary manifestation of the power of culture to draw peoples together within the Cork 2005 programme. Although the thousands were important, it was the core team who were the essence of this piece. Much of the previous year had been spent drawing together a dedicated group of people who helped realise a conceptual vision that few would have started out by understanding. This core group came with its competitions and passions and stories and upsets and fears and joys – like any other. The things we learned from these (almost exclusively) women was the unspoken side story of this poetic undertaking. Many became powerful advocates of what was quite a risky undertaking of contemporary art – one that

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was much derided and joked about by a cynical media looking for ways to diss one of Ireland’s largest cultural undertakings, ever. This dedicated group rose above all that, proud to proclaim the power and importance of a humble domestic craft – one that had been drifting into the abyss of memory in a society transformed by new wealth and new consumerism. This was not trendy young things gathering with a tinge of ironic glee to reinvent a lost art (as was happening in a number of countries at this point) but an unafraid and unashamed group of older women acclaiming, not reclaiming, an art they had lived with all their lives. And what a sea it was, as it descended on to the floor. The realisation of the power of this thing that had emerged so slowly as a result of genuine toil came at the moment, late in the year, when the project was visited by Ireland President Mary McAleese, who gasped out loud as she stepped into the room – a moment of genuine delight that took many of us by surprise. And yes, the Map told a story, of a year in the life of a city undergoing enormous change, and a marking of a special year in its life. Many of those in power in the city, which at that time equated largely to men of power in the business community (the same men whose hubristic behaviour brought the Celtic Tiger crashing to its knees not so many years later), were languidly or arrogantly cynical about the designation as European City of Culture, making available little money at a time when they could well have afforded it. But the designation did bring a swell of cultural activity to the city, some of it reaching the very people that culture often leaves behind (I would claim this for The Knitting Map above much of the offer for the year), and bringing in many visitors from across the world in perhaps their first visit to Ireland. The Knitting Map changed some lives – of this I am sure, despite no literal evidence – and it changed mine, too.

Endpoints and beginnings The Knitting Map was physically and emotionally exhausting. It was not the only project we undertook that year as we had received not one but two commissions from the City of Culture. In the first three months of the year we had undertaken another large-scale community-based project in The White Quadrangle, a performance that took place on St Patrick’s Day, with more than a hundred performers, outdoors, in an early Irish spring. It had necessitated my being away from home for three months. But of course, we were also working hard to make The Knitting Map happen during this period – a period when we believed all of the problems would have already been solved and the project largely ticking over while we concentrated on the performance work. But now, due largely to a failure to secure suitable premises, much of the development was happening at the same time, and knowing that nine months remained once The White Quadrangle was over caused a deep mental wound that was hard to overcome. I remember this time as one of weakness, of being on the verge of breakdown and utterly unable to cope with the physical and emotional toll. We had endured periods of intense hard work with half/angel before this – but nothing as stressful as this.

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Opposite: Figures 13.4, 13.5, and 13.6  The White Quadrangle by half/angel – Jools Gilson and Richard Povall. Photographs by Bernadette Sweeney.

The end of our 2005 adventure spelled the end of half/angel. Not in an acrimonious or violent way, but rather out of a profound exhaustion and an acknowledgement that the toll of working across oceans and borders was becoming too much to bear. A couple of failed funding bids and a stalled new project probably tipped the balance towards this decision. But I came away deeply enriched by 2005, and this decade and a half of working in a collaboration like no other. I had learned new skills, new confidences and new understandings. I had given up an academic career for this work, and it had changed me more radically than anything could have done. It had changed my work from being something rather mechanistic and technical into something with an understanding of the spiritual and the metaphysical. And it gave me a new basis on which to begin a new creative chapter.

Translating place The Knitting Map, for me, marked a new direction in mapping place. Mapping has always carried as much political, social and cultural information as literal information. We’ve known for a long time that “the map is not the thing mapped” (Temple Bell 1933: 138) – and, of course, The Knitting Map, with its levels of abstraction and symbol, is deeply enmeshed in simulation and simulacra. With its multiple layers of digital abstraction, analysis and resynthesis does The Knitting Map perhaps lean more towards the generation of a “real without origin or reality” (Baudrillard 2000: 169)? On the one hand this felt like very familiar territory given half/angel’s deep practice with mapping and synthesis. But we had entered new territory here, and in turn the project ultimately allowed me to progress into new forms of mapping and translation in my ‘other life’, my work with landscape, place and community. The direction The Knitting Map should perhaps have taken me, as I sought a voice beyond that of half/angel, was deeper into community-based practice. I had always had a parallel track in my creative practice – a wobbly parallel with few straight lines and many chicanes and crossovers – in my work with rural landscape and place. After The Knitting Map, this work could not remain unchallenged, and after what had been a bruising and difficult couple of years I retreated into a shell of becoming the executive producer on these new projects, rather than leading creatively.2 But ultimately, I did find a new voice. If The Knitting Map had taught me anything, it was about the fragility of the apparently immutable. The project became, amongst many other things, an expression of the rapidly changing state of Ireland, and the emergent division between rural and urban.

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The vast majority of the women involved in the project had grown up in a repressive, male- and priest-dominated country with all the concomitant societal ills such dominations imply: rape, incest, violence, suppression. Bring a group of women together on a regular basis for many months, and conversations will inevitably drift towards past lives. We were astonished when the knitting circle became a site of revelation; women who shared this repressive history began to talk about it, freed perhaps as much by the changes to the world around them as by the company of other women of the same generation and background. Societal change often unlocks the secrets and lies of the former regime – the territory began to shift in ways we could not possibly have imagined and which I would suggest were not inherent in the initial poetic gesture, the poetic song that gave birth to this project. But I do believe that these stories are now part of the Map, lying somewhere in the fabric of these twisted yarns, in the elegance and power of this extraordinary textile. I became fascinated by the notion that an object can both unlock and tell stories, and an opportunity to find expression for this notion within three projects I was asked to support for the Aune Head Arts project Women in Farming. All three were based on the work of artist Tot Foster, herself a media artist with a history in documentary making. As part of her commission/residency for Women in Farming she had lived with farmer Juliette Rich (who perhaps not entirely by coincidence was also a friend of ours). Juliette had an extraordinary tale to tell. She had spent much of her adult life as a very traditional mother and something of a lynchpin within a social circle of women in the same circumstance. Just as her children had grown into young adults, her husband decided to sell his dental practice and semi-retire by purchasing and running a hill farm on Dartmoor – even then a marginal undertaking dominated by hard physical graft for relatively little financial reward. This, it seemed, was his dream, so off they duly went. Tot recorded this story, which Juliette tells with remarkable equanimity and simplicity, and which culminates with the sudden death of her husband barely a year after the family had upped sticks and moved to Dartmoor. Juliette speaks of this moment, and her ultimate decision to carry on the farm – indeed, it seemed at the time that her straitened circumstances with no insurance and the dental practice still not sold permitted no other decision. How to tell this story? Juliette unearthed her husband’s student dental chest, a beautifully made small pine chest designed to carry the essential tools of the trade for a dentist-in-training and without a fixed practice. It had probably not been opened for decades, but it contained a treasure trove of instruments, mirrors and sets of plastic teeth of different colours to be used for colour matching. When we lifted the inside of the lid, bits of mercury were floating around in tiny little shiny globes. Tot utilised these tools and artefacts and used the chest to tell the story, adding other found objects from the farm: a small bird’s nest, some wheat seeds, a flower packet (Juliette was and remains a keen gardener) and jewellery built from the bits of silver and the plastic teeth she found in the chest. Alone, these told (illustrated?) the story – the story that I now embedded into the chest by breaking the recording up into six roughly equal

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Figure 13.7  Juliette’s Dental Chest. Artist: Tot Foster (electronics by Richard Povall). Image: Aune Head Arts

parts, one for each drawer of the chest. In exhibition, the chest sat silently until one of the drawers was opened, but once a drawer was opened it began to play back Juliette’s story, chapter by chapter. This piece was powerful, its emotions overwhelming for some. It made the object, itself an object of significance with its own clear embedded narrative, redolent of the individuals in the story. Since then, I have built sounds into many different kinds of boxes: in galleries, in homes, in gardens; simple wooden boxes, antique jewellery boxes, dressers, map drawers and metal chests. But I have also discovered my own language.

Language of place I was always made slightly breathless by the poetry of half/angel, not just the underlying poetic gesture, but the words themselves: the poetry and narrative poetics that drove the work. Even The Knitting Map, a non-textual piece, came with its own poetics.

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Another period of enforced change coinciding with a move to a new home in the early 2010s brought this work full circle, and I began to find my own language of place. Although I had always had a close connection to language, I was deeply influenced by Jools’ work, which helped me towards a poetic reframing and allowed me to take tentative steps towards my own language of place. If The Knitting Map helped me to find new ways of using technology to tell a citywide story, half/angel helped me to find my own poetic space.

16 July 2016 A summer mist has blown in from the sea, sending out tongues of swirling cloud and visible air across the ground. Somewhere up there is the warm summer sun, but for days now it has been obscured by cloud, rain and wind. It appeared to be lifting around lunchtime, but the slight rise in temperature brought the fog pouring in across Start Point and up the valley, brought the keening of the fog horn attesting the death of another summer day that never was. But the sea mist has also encouraged the swallows to come out early. Usually it is dusk before they begin to swirl, swoop and dive across the lawn, catching hapless mosquitoes and other insects as they emerge into the early gloaming and into the shadow left behind by the retreating sun. They move with extraordinary speed and accuracy, skimming across the surface of the lawn, so close to the blades of grass I swear I can see them move, as if to hide or shy away from this attack. But the grass itself is of no interest to these carnivores, only the fresh meat of the hundreds of insects they can find here at this time of day. They are astounding flyers, leaving me open-mouthed at the absolute accuracy of their flight. They eat on the wing all day long in summer, rarely settling, flying, it’s believed, about 600 miles a day. When it rains they scoop up the raindrops whilst in flight, and can also preen during flight, using the falling rain to bathe, then swooping upwards to shake off the rain, or skimming the surface of river and lake just enough to splash sufficient water for bathing purposes. There is a precision here that is almost supra-natural, at least in human terms. Humans are so ungainly and imprecise by comparison, even the highly honed neurotic bodies of athletes and dancers. And yet they are promiscuous birds, mating at will with whoever takes their momentary fancy, leaving any anthropomorphising of their breathtaking precision somehow misplaced. Yesterday I watched gulls dance across the surface of a ruffled sea, sailing close just above the water, hesitating for a moment and then dipping their beaks in the water just enough to take the minnows that seemed to be in profusion.

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The moment of hesitation allowed their bodies to drop just a little and lose momentum, sufficient to perform their fishing motion. They will do this tirelessly, working the same area of the shore over and over, as long as the schools of fish remain. And perhaps bizarrely, they will do this alone. The sight of massed and squabbling gulls is as familiar to urban dwellers and farmers as it is to those who live by the sea. But here this fishing is a solitary activity, and not because no other gull had discovered this particular lode. I watched several gulls engaged in this painstaking act, but apart from one another as if content, for once, to share the temporary profusion. Perhaps too there is an understanding that competition never marries with precision – that everyone pouncing on the same piece of water is going to be counterproductive rather than hunger-satisfying. Gulls will fight over an accessible prey, but not now, not here. This is collaboration: a social gesture from a species we dismiss carelessly as greedy and competitive, nothing but raucous street fighters. As always we seem incapable of transcending our own sense of species-superiority unable to read the nuance and intelligence of those we cannot understand.

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AFTERWORD Jools Gilson

A

s this book of 13 chapters goes to print, it is 13 years since The Knitting Map was made in 2005. A fitting spell for a conundrum of excessive femininity. So let me make 13 critical points:

1. Dreaming on a cliff in East Cork in 2003, I imagined knitting taking place high up, women above us, half seen, in a tangle of falling knitting, of wires, and yarn rising to meet them. In my mind, it was quiet, contemplative and unsettling. 2. In 2005, they sit chatting in the half-light of the crypt. Their animated talk an adjacent grammar to the labour of their hands. They laugh often, greeting visitors, as they enter the long hall. But in their hands, the labour continues, uninterrupted. They seem enchanted – those hands, able to remember complex mathematics with extraordinary speed, and without effort. Their fingers are a blur of winding wool around two needles. They keep an embodied count of where to bring the wool forward, and where backward, when to turn the cable, or how to reverse the blocking. And still they talk on. The women who knitted The Knitting Map, there at the top of Summerhill North in Cork. 3. I’m standing in the rain outside the crypt of St Luke’s with Tom McCarthy, waiting for the President of Ireland. When the cavalcade arrives, it blocks the narrow lane of O’Mahony’s Avenue. Men in uniform precede her and then here she is! We greet her and bring her inside, and when she sees The Knitting Map, she gasps. 4. Whilst I had often done interviews with journalists in print and radio before The Knitting Map, nothing prepared me for what it meant to be the author of a work perceived as a major local and national controversy.

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5. In this book, there are monsters that make me grin – monstrous cartographies and femininities, growling in the troubled dusk. 6. In the tumble of meanings that The Knitting Map came to perform, the similarity of the map to an aerial view of the Irish rural landscape astonished me. We chose greens, creams, greys and blues, even mauves falling into lilacs as our palette, and in the process of developing an abstract map, the work became ghosted by the powerful presence of the Irish countryside, what Fionna Barber calls “the sensuous embodiment of landscape.” 7. When I remember you from that year, you felt like a guardian. You were always there, witnessing, and collecting stillness as a way to remember movement. You held me and what I was doing in that quiet way you have. There was something about your shyness and that camera that wound you into what I was doing. Where would those performances be now without you? 8. Remember an artefact of holes remembering wholes, remembering actual and metaphorical whales spouting their water, at the edge of the map. 9. I stood there often in those days of the install, when I was alone with that great heft of femininity. After the curators had carefully hung the work vertically and were off upstairs arranging the Albers, I stood there and watched the wind rise across the lower meadow where The Glucksman stands. It was a strange thing to be in the presence of this contested textile, to be undone by the presence of it. I stood there in my knee pads, having a break between bouts of pleating, folding the work into this new space, noticing the drift between wool and leaf. 10. You listened and cajoled me into thinking through The Knitting Map more deeply, to write and write again; annoyingly and grinningly assured that all this trouble was because of its terrible and wonderful power. I didn’t believe you, I was just bloody sick of the thing. Tired of snotty phone calls from journalists, from another version of it being lost. But you were steady and reminded me that it would come again. That there would be another time for this work, another decade than this long one. 11. “And when they sat down in the evening to knit and weave, they did so with an odd eagerness. As they set about it, needle to needle or in front of the small looms, they started, slowly, to laugh. They began with small gurgles, and sudden little snorts. As they got up to speed however, so their laughter turned into shrieks and howls, until all of them wept with hilarity, rocking with the rhythms of their thread entrancing. The noise was deafening – needles clacking furiously, the stamp of loom pedals, the bang of the over-rod, and above all this whoops and cackles and flesh shaking at the wild game of it all. After half an hour or so, the women were exhausted and ceased their weaving and knitting, collapsing one by one in various piles before the fire. They slept soon after, a sleep strangely quiet after the outrage of their laughter. And in all of this, none of them spoke a word, although she could see how they looked at each other, with a blazing in their eyes.” Jools Gilson-Ellis, mouthplace (1997)

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12. And remember opening the coffin-shaped boxes of The Knitting Map at the storage centre in Kinsale in 2015, how we uncovered their wound memory held between cedarwood, and the spiral of memory. Remember the time in the mortuary in 2006, when we went looking for the thing lost, knowing it was kept there, in the dim light, amongst piles of costume in plastic and pieces of set from long-gone theatre, the trace of sweat lingering. Remember how we went, driven by hearing the map announced as ‘lost’ on the morning news as we drove into work. Remember how we sat in our office in the Triskel and fielded those phone calls from elderly women, who’d heard that we had been so careless about their year of ordinary labour, knotted by their own alchemy into that powerful troubling thing that pushed at the underbelly of how meaning is made. Remember how we listened, and reassured, told them it wasn’t lost at all, that they were making up stories, and no, we didn’t know why. Remember how we called the Arts Officer at the City Council, just to confirm that the map was indeed where we had left it in the store. There, close to the rivers of this island city, of this raining watery place, where meanings slip sometimes, lose their moorings, where visitors turn in the deluge between rivers, unsure of their north and their south. Remember how we found The Knitting Map amongst the piled ephemera of performance, but on our way we turned past the small room where the china mortuary table still lay. Royal Doulton, remembering bodies, and a different time. This book is a living thing that tells stories and weaves wonder and re-members The Knitting Map as a locus for meaning-making that troubled a city, that nudged at the underbelly of memory, that refused to get on the mortuary table, that resisted burial of multiple and persistent kinds. This book is a story and art history and a lodestone for a thousand older women knitting and grinning. This book is for the knitters, for the unsung, the tea made, the granddaughter minded, for the tending of scraped knees, for the ironing of school shirts, for the remembering of birthdays, the holding of grief and the picking up of pieces. 13. Richard and I write tangled in the flight of swallows. And this seems a fitting place to end, in the thrilling arcs of swallows – harbingers of impossible things, things full of a vertiginous wonder.

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Regular Knitters Caroline Kearney; Teresa Cogan; Bernadette O’Keeffe; Linda Hughes; Mary O’Mahoney; Louise Kiely; Marie Carroll; Tracey Kidd; Martina Heffernan; Bernie O’Brien; Betty Flynn; Julia Forde; Maria O’Sullivan; Maura O’Connell; Sr Kathleen Hopkins; Barbara A Bruen; Marie Holmes; Ann Ralph; Margaret Kingston; Maureen O’Sullivan; Maureen McGrath; Paula O’Callaghan; Margaret Keenan; Elizabeth O’Dea; Julie Lucey; Eithne A Farr; Eileen Henrick; Margaret O’Sullivan; Ellen Mullins; Debbie Quinn; Sally O’Neill; Margaret Kennedy; Rita Collins; Julie Pardy; Jessica Hayes; Danielle Coade; Louise Murphy; Leanne Corcoran; Elsie O’Connell; Margaret O’Rourke; May Murphy; Nancy O’Regan; Rose Conlon; Madeleine Ryan; Lainey Sands; Breda Murphy; Claire Kelly; Catherine Buckley; Pauline Buckley; Caroline Heaphy; Chrissie Murphy; Mary Raggett; Mary Lawton; Marie Foy-Twomey; Eileen O’Connor; Tiamna Sands; Frances McCarthy; Margaret Jones; Elizabeth Garry Brosnan; Maeve Lankford; Stella Barry; Noelle Nagle; Mary Goggin; Eilish Triggs; Noreen Coady; Mary Norris; Cynthia Kelly; Katrina Forde; Jennifer O’Callaghan; James Moone; Michael Moone; Rosemary Moone; Nokuthula Nkomo; Ciara Murphy; Dolores Cummins; Pre McSuise; Kay Mullaly; Joy Sarah Hurley; Ann Marie O’Riordan; Jemma Ring; Anita Geaney; Maeve Hennessy; Rachel O’Mahony; Justine Ni Bheollann; Mel Murphy; Kia Deerey; Mercy Foley; Sally Buckley; Manlyn Munza; Judith Nitifiskinji; Ann Holland; Kitty O’Sullivan; Hanna Carey; Georgina O’Donovan; Clare Whelan; Margot Cullen; Grace Madden; Susan McNamara; Loretta Mullins; Anna Njonguo; Jane Duggan; Valerie O’Brien (L’arche); Helen Ryan (L’arche); Sinead Barry (L’arche); Rita Guinan (L’arche); Angela Burchill (L’arche); Fionnuala Laide; Martha Duane; Kathleen Creedon; Eileen Lombard; Nancy Leahy; Thembelihle Tshuma Mkwananzi; Julie Anne Carleton; Teresa Geary; June Hosford; Mary Ryan-Purcell; Richard Povall; Ane McSuise; Claire O’Mahony; Valerie Walsh; Emer O’Reilly; Kaitlin Lucey; Mai Murphy; Una Clarke; Helen Quill; Rena O’Driscoll; Jackie Magnin; Muireann Marygold; Rachel Walsh; Susan Alexander Wilson; Rita Jung; Nuala O’Donovan; Lilian Casey; Lionel Kamanda; Julianne Griffin; Jennifer Linehan; Maeve Kidney; Mary Greene; Teresa Kelleher; Emma McCarthy; Coleen Jones; Linda McCarthy; Sarah Cremin; Eadaoin Looney; Eavan Looney; Wiebke Dibbern; Ruth Thompson; George Thompson; Beth Thompson; Teresa Cunningham; Chris Dunlea; Siobhan O’Sullivan; Rita Walsh; Maryann Darmody; Lilian Daly; Robert McCormick; Úna Long; Marianne; Kathy O’Brien; Jennifer Hegarty; Jools Gilson-Ellis; Irene O’Leary; Carole Crowley; Ruth Jackson; Anne Donaldson; Sr de Chantal Ryan; Kristin Philbrick; Nora Murphy; Breeda Cale; Sarah Moynihan; Hannah Coakley; May O’Donovan; Rose McGuire; Anna O’Leary; Darren O’Brien; Cecilia Gamez; Angela McCarthy

Knitters Úna Long; May Keohane; Maureen O’Sullivan; Nora Frawley; Elsie O’Connell; Eithne Farr; Maura Cotter; Ann Holland; Maureen O’Leary; Nuala O’Donovan; Siobhan O’Sullivan; Mary Nolt; Louise Kiely; Mary Goggin; Sadie Magin; Mary Gibbons; Maureen O’Reilly; Nora Gibbons; Margaret Keenan; Christine McGregor; Margaret O’Rourke; Anna Njonguo; Rose Conlon; Jane Duggan; Barbara A Bruen; Breda O’Rourke; Maureen Crowley; Vera Virgo; Mary Cummins; Lucy Lamb; Jacinta Lucas; Geraldine Creaner; Sinead Creaner; Nuala Cannon; Ciara Cannon; Eva Maher; Jeanienne McCarthy; Tanya O’Sullivan; Nokuthula Nkomo; Fionnuala Laide; Nancy O’Regan; May Murphy; Theresa Kelleher; Julianne Griffin; Nora Keohane Hickey; Angela Perkins; Marian

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O’Sullivan; Alice Delea; Mary Norris; Leslie Stothers; Johanne Fitzpatrick; Deirdre Martin; Mona Crean; Betty Flynn; Eileen Henrick; Elizabeth O’Dea; Mary O’Mahoney; Linda Hughes; Helen Sheehan; Mercy Foley; Hilary Doonan; Madeleine Ryan; Karla Butler; Brigid Butler; Kathryn O’Brien; Pauline Hyde; Marie O’Sullivan; Tracey Kidd; Breda Murphy; Bernadette O’Keeffe; Teresa Cogan; Martina Heffernan; Marie Carroll; Sister de Chantal Ryan; Catherine Buckley; Claire Kelly; Marie Foy-Twomey; Mai Murphy; Julia Forde; Emily Dulahery; Mercy Shanahan; Nora Campbell; Kitty Moore; Phil Stankerd; Angela MacGrath; Freda McCabe; Grace Madden; Caroline Kearney; Maureen McGrath; Paula O’Callaghan; Eileen O’Connor; Nóirín O’Flynn; Lucy Roche; Bernadette Fleming; Maura O’Connell; Anita Gearey; Margaret Kingston; Ann Ralph; Maura Carty; Nora Cody; Sr Kathleen Hopkins; Ellen Mullins; Bridget Doyle; Julie Lucey; Breda O’Regan; Honor Cashell; Nora Manning; Josie Broderick; Josephine Ralff; Rita Collins; Hannah Fitzgerald; Kieran McCarthy; Donal Moloney; Avril Butler; Karen Wren; Kathleen Creedon; Bernie O’Brien; Pauline Buckley; Caroline Heaphy; Moira O’Sullivan; Deirdre Sexton; Mary Little; Maureen Fitzsimons; Stella Barry; Deirdre Baynes; Margaret Kennedy; Margaret O’Sullivan; Ciara Murphy; Rachel O’Shea; Marilyn Munza; Sue Tector Sands; Christina Dartnell; Noreen Coady; Chrissie Murphy; Mary Lawton; Mary Raggett; Kathleen Noonan; Emma Hegarty; Emma McCarthy; Martha Duane; Elizabeth Garry Brosnan; Maeve Lankford; Pauline O’Brien; Breeda Collins; Catherine Hegarty; Anne Hegarty; Sheila O’Neill; Therese O’Regan; Clare Whelan; Linda Whyte; Shauna Whyte; Evelyn Greaney; Cecilia Taylor; Marilyn Murray; Breda Healy; Sandra Cox; E Cullen; A McCarthy; M Taylor; Jane Lucas; Margot Cullen; Linda McGlynn; Veronica Kingston; Peggy Horan; Francis O’Donnell; Margaret Cronin; Anne Kennedy; Noreen O’Flynn; Chris Dunlea; Joy Seawright; Susan Mewis; Louis Auld; Lily Pierce; Eileen Gillis; Helen Smyth; Margaret Dowse; Susan Codfier; Jeannette Bell; Helen Z Cronin; Daphne Grainger-Chezman; Iris Edwards; Charlotte Neale; Bertha Hastings; Myra Stanley; Mary Wallace; Sarah G Champ; Frances Dowse; Martha Walker; Margaret Hemmingway; Joan Dieu; Sean Warren; Edith Rafter; Ciara Geaney; Lies Spaink; Breda Hurley; Diane Webster; Jane Dale; Eilish Triggs; Josephine Broderick; Lisa Rofom; Helen Quill; Alla Dulahery; Christine Dunlea; Dympna Allen; Patricia Costello; Betty Layton; Mary D’Arcy; Jo Quinlan; Eileen O’Sullivan; Lynn Trevor; Emma Geary; Amy Kate Trevor; Danielle Coade; Julie Pardy; Leanne Corcoran; Louise Murphy; Jessica Hayes; Mary Kennedy; John Skeates; Anne Duff; Eily Bowen; Elizabeth Doherty; Kitty O’Mahoney; Hannah Carey; Beth Roycroft; Jane Bryant; Jean Pain; Sr Josephine McDonald; Joyce O’Brien; Caroline Twomey; Christina Kelleher; Stephanie Yeats; Taslima Akter; Cindy Lyes; Jennifer Murphy; Megan Kearney; Orla Forrest; Sarah Scanlon; Alice Keating; Mel Murphy; Rita Walsh; Rita O’Regan; Nancy Leahy; Noreen Coady; Judith Nitifiskinji; Fiona Walsh; Anna Kennedy; Florrie O’Connell; Kitty Turnbull; Bridget Dwyer; Claire Keane; Finola McGovern; Claire O’Mahony; Helen Ryan; Susan McNamara; Angela Burchill; Jess Hennessy; Jemma Ring; Nicole Heaphy; Debbie Quinn; Mags Conway; Ann Marie O’Riordan; Betty Condon; Anita Geaney; Noelle Nagle; Mary Murphy; Sylvia O’Driscoll; Rachel O’Mahony; Katrim Forde; Marie Holmes; Colm O Ceallachoin; Yvonne McEniry; Eadaoin McDonagh; Sheila Fleming; Kelly Jonas; Glenn Tector; Freda McCabe; Caroline Kearney; Angela McGrath; Sheila McGrath; Noreen Boady; Sr M Berchmans; Sally O’Neill; Tiamna Sands; Kay Mullaly; Ane McSuise; Sally Buckley; Eileen Lombard; Rachel Sheehan; Ninita O’Driscoll; Donna O’Donoghue; Dale O’Sullivan; Llana Cotter; Sheyanne A Johnson; Ann Marie O’Riordan; Marguerite Conway; Aisling O’Connor; Mary Goggin; Marcy Leahy; Roisin Macartain; Valerie Walsh; Emer O’Reilly; Daimsie O’Connell; Teresa S; Caroline Cip; Miriam Beller; Stefanie Jagen; Silke Rudigieu; Dieten Hanschite; Sabrina Vagwerdner; Sarah Holzer; Marina Maschlar; Jenn

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Duss; Marilyn Munza; Paula Murray; Ciana Murphy; Sarah Jane; Lorraine Hogan; Meuisa Curran; Margaret Jones; Frances McCarthy; Eve Neilamd; Jean Rockley; Ann Bates; Lainey Sands; Mona Lucey; Mary Devery; Grainna Dacy; Joy Sarah Hurley; Emily Moloney; Kate Jordan; Clare Sands; Aoife O’Donnell; Sr de Chantal Ryan; Jennifer O’Callaghan; Katrina Forde; Cynthia Kelly; Justine Finn; Ashley Anderson; James Moone; Rosemary Moone; Michael Moone; Kia Deerey; Sue Stevens; Bob Stevens; Brid O’Leary; Mary Doherty; Helen Hourican; Janet Carpenter; Ana Carpenter; Jillian Dame; Catherine Glavin; Sabina Nagle; Carmel O’Sullivan; Jennifer Forde; Don Golden; Melanie Orr; Stephan Band; Lisa Hennessy; Helen Van Wolvelaene; Jill Jerreira; Cona Carroll; Teresa Farry; Maeve Hennessy; Bindie Mulqueen; Ethel McLeish McCarthy; Mary Weston; Kay O’Driscoll; Ashaki Dore; Roger Caidiz; Kevin Weekes; Jason Halder; Christopher; Vivienne Davis; Laura Crowlery; Elodie Gaget; Annelle O’Sullivan; Niamh Kurby; Catherine O’Driscoll; Nellie Shine; Manon Sheehan; Dolores Cummins; Trease Ni Mhaolain; Dorlas Cullen; Brid Murphy; Evelyn Quinlan; Anne Carleton; Ena Howell; Marion Twomey; Marguerite Cashman; Teresa Kelleher; Loretta Mullins McGillion; Mona Lucy; Ag Moon; Hanna Carey; Justine Ni Bheollann; John Harrington; Bernie Dwyer; Stephen Lynch; Kieran McCaffrey; Breda O’Mull; Kitty O’Sullivan; Georgina O’Donovan; Rhoda Kearney; Caron Murphy; Julia Lucey; Marguerite Conway; Nicole Flannery; Kelly Price; Agnes Moon; Rosaleen Marole; Ruadhan Creed-Myles; Rosario Alaniz Lamez; Andrew Jergeson; Mary O’Driscoll; Kitty Elboore; Ciona Corcoran; Mary Nott; Carissa O’Ceallaghan; William Buckley; Theresa O’Regan; M Buckley; Maire Corcoran; Nagen Pelzel; Carmel K; Ray Venhem; Mary O’Toole; Pat Hilly; Laura O’Connell; Anne Barrett; Emer Barrett; Brigid O’Connor; Olivia O’Connor; Cllr Perland Dempsey; Eileen Dempsey; Susan Coade; Betty McCarthy; Nora Murphy; Doreen Walsh; Lionel Kamanda; Sheila Kiely Quinlan; Aaron Neville; Eamon Quinlan; Sinead Quinlan; Emma Neville; Vivienne O’Regan; David O’Regan; Sarah O’Regan; Jackie Magsin; Kathy O’Brien; Teresa Hallahan; Thembelihle Tshuma Mkwananzi; Hannehe W P Bolderink; Alex; Dolores Cotter; Ena Atkinson; Stacey Quinlivan; Anita Geerey; Imelda Power; Betty Long; Kathryn Leen; Felicity Amer; Emma Ormerod; Andrea Johnson; Keith Gresson; Meadhbh McEvoy; Ailish Kelly Moloney; Emilie Heritean; Hilini Mohamod; Bridie Raleigh; Catherine Lynch; Liam McGillion; Kay Murphy; Jaristh Walsh; Eavan Looney; Eadaoin Looney; Guy Dotson; Helen Heedes; Marc Dlier; Rita Murphy; Saidhbhe Ellick; Mairead Ellick; Mousy Ellick; Tanith; Pauline Binglee; Sabrina Welier; Teresa Geary; Julie Anne Carleton; Carman Lanches; Richard Povall; Valerie O’Brien L’arche; Helen Ryan L’arche; Sinead Barry L’arche; Rita Guinan L’arche; Angela Burchill L’arche; Mary L’arche; Patrice McAdoo; Susan McAdoo; Nuala O’Shea; Betty O’Donoghue; Lyuda O’Donnell; Patsy O’Mullane; Kathleen Bogan; Ger O’Toole; Colin O’Toole; Jules O’Toole; Luke Clancy; Mary Ryan-Purcell; Sarah Ryan-Purcell; Mark RyanPurcell; John Ryan-Purcell; Margaret Parker; Nessa McGann; Ruth Jackson; Irene Nolan; Adrienne Nolan; Jillian Bolger; Franz Kretner; Martina Kelher; Margaret McSwiney; Claire McSwiney; James Foley; Fergal Foley; Sonnie McDonadh; Rena O’Driscoll; Donagh McCarthy; Jadie Magnin; Rose Twomey; Elizabeth Cronin; Kathleen Griffin; Kate Palmer; Karen O’Connor; Gemma Desmond; Ka Lingwood; Holly Lingwood; Brian Nolan; Bonnie Kavanagh; Aine O’Raghailligh; Gemma Sexton; Sheila Rennie; Brid Corkery; Leonil Powell; Kaitlin Lucey; Kit Deeney; Grace Walsh; Nancy Ware; Deirdre Brennan; Anna Nyorgro; Catherine Feeney; Fiona Dunne; Mary Tighe; Kirsten Lanes; Angela Burchill; Bridie O’Donoghue; Daphne Spillane; Hazel Allen; Jemma Cotter; Eileen Egan; Bree Watkin; Nikita O’Sullivan; Bridget Walsh; Claire Walsh; Michael O’Leary; Kate Kalin; Holly Burgess; Kay O’Riordan; Una Clarke; Susan Alexander Wilson; Maney O’Regan; Elisabeth Dehon; Catherine Abrams; Jules Liegel; Margaret Teegan;

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Helen Roche; Mary Quill; Kitty Whelan; Muireann Marygold; Pat Powell; Brymm Powell; David Deets; Siobhan Devlin; Sr Anna Patrick Walsh; Sr Patricia Somers; Aileena O’Connor; Mary Hayes; Myffina O’Briain; Ansuya Murphy; Melissa Jonn; Tracy Ryan; Irene Helen; Karen Kelleher; Dave Carville; Rachel Walsh; Louise Shanahan; Emily Maher; Roisin Neville; Hailey Dineen; Dylan Walsh; Kate McDermott; Denise Twomey; Joan McAllister; Michel Romey; Katy Lyons; Kay ParrBurman; May Ratcliffe; Elaine Kelly Conroy; Joan Fleming; Agnes O’Connor; Melissa Williams; Marie-Ann O’Brien; Lily Martyn; Nicola Bessell; Maureen O’Neill; Niamh Walsh; Jayne Foley; Mary McCarthy; Valerie Byrne; Lilian Casey; Joan Lucey; Fergal Crowley; Anne Donaldson; Jane Sullivan; Rita Jung; Barbara Sweeney; Jacky Ryan; Rebecca Ryan; Margaret Murrey; Liam Fitzgerald; Coleen Jones; Mary Mulcahy; Philip Punch; Lydia Punch; Sue Hassett; Jools GitsonEllis; Kitty Moore; Jn De Groote; Stien Van Mienlo; Yoel Chemin; Dorothy Taylor; Nina Dennehy; Olga Dennehy; Patricia McNamara; Brian Lalor; Breda Madden; Helen Egar; Anne Barber; Helen Spillane; Martin Spillane; Amelia Combonos; Samantha Barry; Deirdre A Geary; Eileen Daly; Laura Summerhill-Coleman; Bearden Coleman; Kate O’Brien; Ann Buckley; Grace Perryman; Martha Cashman; Anna Carey; Picdad Fernandez; Felix Toledo Lernin; Carol Lanigan; Eilis Conolly; Maureen Cooney; Anne Cooney; Jo Barry; Veronika Wilson; Emma De Lacey; Maeve Kidney; Jennifer Linehan; Judith Browne; Darren O’Brien; Jacinta Prunty; Mary Greene; Helen Harris; Yukari Watashiba; Falyn Jenkins; Mary Harrington; Clair Harrington; Anne O’Malley; Ronan Doyce; Sally-Ann Gell; Maria Leane; Helen Fitzpatrick; Elizabeth Fitzpatrick; Carol Cave; Kay O’Donovan; Martha O’Brien; Marian O’Ceallaghan; Janet Thomas; Margaret O Cinneide; Jack Wrixon; Rebecca Wrixon; Sarah Wrixon; Julie Lucey; Ann Pyke; Linda McCarthy; Meg Tracy Morgin; Eleanor Power; Lauryn Power; Lilian Daly; Eileen Allen; Maire Ui Chaoimh; Una O’Dea; Mairin O’Flynn; Kayleigh Flynn; Joanne Harrington; Sarah Cremin; Pat O’Looney; Beth Thompson; George Thompson; Ruth Thompson; Phil Fitzgerald; Eileen Howe; Ann Dixon; Teresa Cunningham; Aine Collins; Wiebke Dibbern; Selina O’Regan; Jean Kiely; Dara Lacey; Rekina O’Regan; Kevin Quin; Glenn Quin; Maurice Allshire; William Allshire; Sister de Lourde Keane; Niamh Motherway; Sarah File; Frances Mulloy; Mary Shanahan; Sarah Latmour; Judy Latmour; Margaret Keenan; Regina Barrett; Michelle Kilcoyne; David Kilcoyne; Jennifer Kilcoyne; Mary Kilcoyne; Liam Lavery; Kathryn Kelly; Audrey Baylor; Audrey Harris; Brenda Foulds; Barbara Reev; Phil Hussey; Mary Hussey; Annelies Verliest; Edith Bridcut; Bereniece Rieelewal; Margaret O’Neill; Orla McKean; Anna Mulinhill; Lynn Benson; Bernadette O’Riordan; Dan O’Riordan; Paula Spillane; Narlene Ejcarnot; Susan Allen; Vera Allen; Maria Lezama; Tilly Driscoll; Alex Driscoll; Valerie Driscoll; Joan O’Callaghan; Kay Dillon; Bridie Kennedy; Cathy Wilkes; Alice Lawlor; Betty Desmond; Anny Peppand; Sean Conway; Sashina Gnas; May Fuller; Nancy Falvey; Kieran Anthony Myohy; Shelly Cornell; Bridie Tobin; Jennifer Hegarty; Rita Walsh; Chris Dunlea; Marian Kane; Mie Nagaoka; Brigid Purcell; Mary Purcell; Michael Purcell; Maryann Darmody; Kay Conolon; Noreen O’Keefe; Margaret Carey; Sarah-Rose Buckley; Kellie O’Connell; Sinead O’Rourke; Amy O’Regan; Alannah O’Connor; Natalie Dewale; Alby Cotter; Aoife Murphy; Ciara Murphy; Tara O’Keefe; Niamh Carey; Donna O’Keefe; Claire O’Brien; Nicola Hogan; Ellen Hoare; Claire Coleman; Meabh O’Neill; Sylvia Ryan; Leanne Batchelor; Niamh McCarthy; Sabrina Buckley; Natasha Dewale; Olga Dorney; Heather O’Keefe; Evelyn Finnerty; Sr de Chantal Ryan; Cliona Greally; Sheila Grattan; Annie Cronin; Florina Phelan L’Arche; Marion Kane; Hannah Condry; Eileen de Barra; Sheila McCarthy; Niamh Foley; Robert McCormick; Nancy Murphy Attridge; Eileen Attridge; Helen McElroy; Hannah Coakley; Sarah Moynihan; Peg O’Donovan; Julian O’Sullivan; Phil Blachere; Maureen O’Brien; Rosaline O’ Cown; Geraldine Walsh; Sharon O’Brien;

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Breda Harnett; Maura Kearney; Breda Noonan; Howard Thomas; Ann Davies; Marianne; Kathleen Hoey; Nancy Leahy; Jolanda Woschitz; Audrey Feegan; Audrey Murphy; Carole Crowley; Breeda Cale; Angela McCarthy; Irene O’Leary; Paula Delaney; Margaret Noonan; Jo Roos; Sarah Roos; Janice Fairholm; Sr de Chantal Ryan; Anne Fitzgerald; Betty O’Brien; Chris Donnolly; Noreen O’Flynn; Ruth Jillespie; Anna Moloney; Eva Gould; Aoibhin Sheehy; Jeanne Forrester; Franc Chamberlain; Carmel Fenton; Ana Hannigan; Anna Bolger; Lucia Sheehan; Helena Sheehan; Chloe Sheehan; Joan Hales; Rosemary L Hickey; Jean Patterson; Heather Calvert; Mey Holland; Betty Hart; Aileen Hart; Trish Hart; Carol Jones; Ann Rulph; Marianne Hodel; Rebecca Myler; Mary Williamson; Bernadette McKenna; Bridie Noonan; Lisa Sweeney; Mary Sweeney; Anita Martin; Ann Mooney; Kristin Philbrick; Betty Shorten; Claire Kelly; Jennifer Hearaty; Sheila Collins; Mari Deasy; Katie O’Shea; Siobhan Goodall; Elaine Keane; Eimear Nolan; Seana Haughey; Laura Cleary; Vera O’Connor; Lilian Salter; Mary O’Donovan; Fifi Smith; Aine Hurley; Alex Moore; Hollie Seward; Clara Power; Jessica Kwong; Rachel Ahern; Jenny Madden; Emily Eivers; Jayne Groarke; Eadin O’Mahony; Sorcha Lanigan; Katie Toscano; Denise Mansfield; Sally Rowe; Megan Rowe; Holly Rowe; Grace Rowe; Lucy Rowe; Pamela Wood; Faye Pittorinio; Maria Pittorinio; Brendan Pittorinio; Julie Walsh; Sarah Martin; Emily Barrett; Kellie Hackett; Shauna Murphy Dooley; Lisa Higgins; Ciara Costello; Aoife Looney; Sarah Dennehy; Ellie Kiely; Denise Keohane; Margaret McCoy; Karen Coleman; Sarah Buckley; Leah Murphy; Rachel Cough; Lauren Cronin; Caoimhe Howley; Alana Murphy Dooley; Margaret O’Rourke; Breda Breen; Mary Norris; Rose Forde; Maureen Ashley; Nuala O’Donovan; Louise Buckley; Rebecca Barford Ryan; Sally Buckley; Christina Jonathan Lill; Catherine Jattan; Emma Barry Murphy; Rachel Condon; Chloe Cuthbart; Ellen Desmond; Catriona Dowling; Jacqueline Feehey; Eveanne Kearney; Rebecca Martin; Niamh McDermott; Ciara McEvoy; Jill Mitchen; Chloe Nagle; Ellen O’Brien; Rachel O’Donnell; Ciara Lynch O’Kelly; Marie Claire O’Sullivan; Avril Riordan; Yasmin Sofarhoundi; Ileane Wright; Ciara Whitbread; Kelly Barry; Zoe Donnelly; Kellie Seward; Shannon O’Mahony; Julie Condon; Laura Froggatt; Cliona Dowling; Olivia Harrington; Kim Forde; Keela Ó Gráda; Holly Hurley; Marian Healy; Angela Maddock; Ruby Maddock; Mary Connolly O’Sullivan; Marie Claire Connolly O’Sullivan; Hugh Maddock; Denise Richards; Claire Thompson; Liz Goodwin; Tessa Foost; May O’Donovan; Amelia Berriman; Herta Rigney; Caroline Farnan; Laure Baud; Rose McGuire; Roye Mulcahy; Virginia O’Driscoll; Jann Armstrong; Juliana Purcell; Cheryl Manling; Fiodhna Ní Bhaoill; Sheila O’Neill; Bridget Egan; Bernadette Graham; Anna O’Leary; Anne Morrissey; Pauleen Byrne; Carmel Feslia; Claire Ó Duinnín; Cáit Ó Duinnín; Ned Dwyer; Clare O’Halloran; Fergus Dunne; Mary Davis; Dolores Elward; Deirdre Baynes; Lilian Burghard; April Gunn; Elaine Payne; Denise O’Sullivan; Jo Bradfield; Margaret Duggan; Teresa Darmooly; Declan Lynch; Ann O’Sullivan; Viv Davis; Matt Howard; Ita Morrissey; Betty Flynn; Gay Listin; Claire O’Connell; Molly Hull; Margaret Cashman; Angela Cashman; Johnny Cashman; Bridget Conroy; Caroline Cronin; Kathy Irwin; Katherine Irwin; Dymphna Coughlan; Mary Kennedy; Maura Brennan; Jamsie O’Connell; Elaine McCoo; Peggy Corr; Aoife McMahon; Gabrielle Rocket; Ina Harte; Gretta O’Donovan; Juliet Crowley; Beryl Teape; Liam O’Leary; Robert Moley; Onóra Ní Dhomhnaill; Cáit O’Donovan; Bernie Van Damme; Helen Cadogan; Valerie Barry; Frances Butler; Theresa Hennessy; Noelle Burke; Nellie Burke; Kitty Saunders; Joan Gray; Ann Linehan; Linda Kasey; Ian Downey; Sarah O’Sullivan; Jessica Lynch; Madeleine Carton; Liz O’Shea; Kristell Cartel; Nora Donovan; Francoise Pujade Hennessy; Kathleen Hennessy; Trish Lenihan; Cecilia Ryall; Ronnie Denny; Lydia Coveney; Finbarr Warren; Helena Scully; James O’Connell; Kety Zahila; Ann McCormack; Vicky Germanabou; Maurice Jablin; Schellekens; Liz Berril; Gerda Forsiner; Erika Rockenschaulo;

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Christine Schopf; Oisin O’Neill; Nehly Lehr; Frances O’Sullivan; Frances O’Sullivan; Geraldine O’Rourke; Kitty O’Sullivan; Georgina O’Donovan; Marie O’Shea; Mohammad Naseer; J T McManus; Diana Therdruss; Elsie H Bose; Fanny Ruestes; Josephine Helly; June Hosford; Eleanor Power; Hilary Davies; Helena Poole; Mary E; Maria Leane; Mary Fahy; Maree Longwell; Jill Donnellan; Angela Shaw; Veronica Slinow; Sonny O’Connell; Mary O’Connell; Jo McGrath; Ann O’Mahony; Catherine Bocher; M. Cobbaert; Jeri Robinson; Irina Lawrence; Tejal Lawrence; Aisling O’Leary; Kay Linehan; Nadine Collens; Karen Harrington; Rosaleen O’Rourke; Fionnula Crowley; Maggie Blackley; Charlotte Blackley; Julie Matindale; Helena De Gramer; Julienne Ennekens; Polly Donnell; Maryann Darmody; Anne Michelsson; Isabelle Raue; Susan Moore; Jean Cole; Rita Connolly; Marian Daughty; Lucy Hovinga; Katharina Schatz; Monika Poschner; Marie McLean; Betty Cloke; Patsy Britton; Avien Bekker; Eibhlín Uí Mhurchú; Siobhán Kelly; Catherine O’Reilly; Kathryn Reynolds; Sheila O’Neill; Eileen O’Leary; Peg Crowley; Marie Gibson; Susan Foley; Kathleen McAllister; Brenda Smith; Jennie Smith; Helena Scully; Selena Scully; Ann Lawn; Eibhlín Ní Seanachán; Jean Guilfayle; Mary Browne; Gemma Burke; Mary Ferry; Kathleen Cannon; Helen Heaney; Cecilia Gamez; Karla Kowalski; Janice Giubert; Maurice Giubert; Monica Emmet; Emer O’Sullivan; Deirdre Murphy; Jenny Murphy; Siobhán Lynch; Janice Gilbert

Afterword   190

ENDNOTES

Chapter 1 1. This chapter was originally published in Performance Research in 2012, 17 (1): 9-20. As ‘Navigation, Nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map: A Series of Navigational Directions . . . ‘ by Jools Gilson, and is reprinted here by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com). 2. This was one of the most complex of all our knitting stitches: Open Honeycomb Cable (knitting pattern where K = knit, and P = purl): The pattern begins on the wrong side, so work 1 row knit before starting. Row 1: K2, p8, k2; rep to end. Row 2: P2, C4B (slip next 2 sts onto cable needle and hold at back of work, k2, k2 from cable needle) C4F (slip next 2 sts onto cable needle and hold at front of work, k2, k2 from cable needle), p2; rep to end. Row 3: As 1st. Row 4: P2, k8, p2; rep to end. Row 5: As 1st. Row 6: As 4th. Row 7: As 1st. Row 8: As 4th. These 8 rows form pattern. Repeat.

(Matthews 1984: 63) 3. This section is adapted from Barkun & Gilson-Ellis 2007. 4. The Knitting Map was exhibited at the Ganser Gallery in Philadelphia in April/May 2007. Margaret Kennedy worked on this exhibition for half/angel. 5. These were STEIM Studios, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Jun & Sept 96); Institute for Choreography & Dance, Cork, Ireland (ICD) (Oct 97, Apr 98, Jun 99); The Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, Dept. of Media and Visual Arts (Mar/Apr 98, Aug/Sep 98, Apr 99 & Sep/Oct 99).

191

6. Artistically, The Directors of Smartlab Digital Media Institute (London, UK), Arts and Culture at The Council of Europe (Strasbourg, France), The European Cultural Foundation (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Dance City (Newcastle, UK) and the Chair of Visual Arts at Millersville University (Pennsylvania, US), were all struck enough by their visits to TKM in 2005 to invite half/angel to develop further projects with them. These were, respectively, Lizbeth Goodman, Robert Palmer, Gottfried Wagner, Penny Rae and Jeri Robinson-Lawrence. Positive international media coverage of TKM included Der Standard (Austria, Alioth 2005), Helsingen Sannomat (Finland, Sipilä 2005), Stavanger Aftenblad (Norway, Andreassen 2005), Wysokie Obcasy (Poland, Panków 2005), Newzy.fr (France, Guilcher 2005), BBC News (UK, Davis 2005), The Guardian (UK, Glancey 2005), Vogue Knitting (UK, Fawcett 2005) and Simply Knitting (UK, Bradley 2005). TKM was also the subject of a chapter in a PHD thesis in 2009 (Sotelo 2009). 7. In an article written in 2006, Alan O’Riordan reports on a public forum about The Knitting Map, organised to coincide with the exhibition of the work in the Millennium Hall, Cork as part of the Midsummer’s Festival. He wrote: “The Knitting Map became a symbol of Cork 2005’s perceived failure. By its unusual nature, it became a caricature for a grateful media to lampoon; and, in the climate of recrimination which ran through the year, it was an easy target.” But he also writes: “From the knitters’ own enthusiastic testimony, nobody could doubt that the map meant a great deal to the people who worked on it . . .” (O’Riordan 2006). See also: http://www.rte .ie/archives/2015/0824/723181-cork-knitters-make-giant-textile-record/ from the RTÉ Archives (RTÉ is Ireland’s national television station). This short clip includes interviews with some of the knitters of The Knitting Map. 8. Men were involved in knitting The Knitting Map, and were always welcome. But in the end, they were a tiny minority. 9. It was probably also the case that when The Knitting Map was commissioned in 2003, the executive of Cork 2005 expected their budget to be far higher than it eventually was, so that funding for the project ended up as a much larger proportion of the overall budget than was intended. 10. For example, Daniel Libeskind’s Eighteen Turns was installed as a temporary exhibit in Fota House as part of the programme for Cork’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2005. This stunning architectural caprice cost almost the same as The Knitting Map to have as a temporary exhibit (May–Dec 2005), but did not attract a whisper of criticism over its funding. 11. The history of cartography in and of Ireland is closely bound up with Britain’s colonial project to claim its territory as its own. See Brian Friel’s play Translations for an exploration of the poetic and political impact of this history (Friel 1981). Sometimes this history has had violent personal consequences for the cartographer; in the early seventeenth century, Richard Bartlett, an English army officer under Charles Blount (Lord Deputy Mountjoy), depicted the taming of Ulster and the unruly O’Neill in cartographic form: Bartlett seems to have been beheaded by Donegal militants, who

Endnotes   192

in the words of one account, ‘would not have their countrie discovered’ (cited by Smyth 2007: 17, from Andrews 2008, then in progress). 12. For a discussion of this depiction of Ireland as feminine in relation to colonial Britain, see Tovey, Share & Corcoran 2007, and Cairns & Richards 1988.

Chapter 2 1. The Knitting Map was shown as a parallel exhibition with Stitch in Time: The Fabric of Contemporary Life at The Glucksman, University College Cork, 2 April to 5 July 2015. 2. Since this essay was written, Ireland voted on 25 May 2018 by a landslide majority (66.4%) to legalise abortion, in a historic and defining moment of cultural change. 3. The 1983 referendum confirmed the illegality of abortion in Ireland by recognising the equal right to life of the pregnant woman and the unborn. This, in combination with the death of Ann Lovett and the Kerry Babies case, marked a defining moment in both repressive attitudes to unmarried mothers and feminist struggles around Irish women’s control of their own sexuality. Ann Lovett was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who died giving birth in a grotto of the Virgin Mary in Granard, Co. Longford on 31 January 1984. The Kerry Babies case referred to Gardaí investigations into the death of one newborn baby and the alleged murder of another in County Kerry, also in 1984. Joanna Hayes, the unmarried mother of the first baby, who died on the family farm, was also accused of giving birth to and murdering the second, despite the fact that the infant had a completely different blood type and was found on a beach some distance away.

Chapter 3 1. From Mick Hannigan’s Twitter feed. 2. In an interview with the author. 3. In newspapers, headlines, standfirsts (subheads) and picture captions are written by in-house editors, rather than the reporter/author. 4. Sebastian Barry’s 2002 play Hinterland, an allegorical work that took inspiration from the corrupt behaviour of former Irish Prime Minister Charles J. Haughey, was termed ‘moronic’ and ‘bad manners’ by Irish Times literary critic Eileen Battersby (Irish Times 9 Feb 2002) and became the subject of public controversy in Ireland. 5. At that time, Gilson was referred to in reports as Gilson-Ellis. 6. A standfirst is a subheading. 7. There was much speculation during 2005 as to how much civic funding had been received by The Knitting Map; the final amount was not revealed until after 2005.

Endnotes   193

8. In total, the Arts Council commissioned nine projects, with €1M at its disposal, to mark the occasion in 2016. 9. Article 41.2 of the Irish Constitution, which was written in 1937, states that: “By her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour the neglect of their duties in the home.”

Chapter 4 1. See three important books: Parker 1989, Auther 2010 and Buszek 2011. 2. There are distinctions between collective (a group of individuals maintaining their individual identities, working together on a shared goal, such as a publication, like Heresies, where my own collective experience was honed); collaborative (two or more individuals or a group creating a single project together, sharing authorship) and cooperative (working under a lead artist or artists toward a shared goal). 3. For Gomme, Esparza, Newport and Sandra Valenzuela, see Unknitting: Challenging Textile Traditions. (Giangiulio 2008). Introduction by Kate Bonansinga and illuminating text by Stephanie L. Taylor. 4. http://lizcollins.com 5. I am indebted to Kirsty Robinson’s essay ‘Rebellious Doilies and Subversive Stitches: Writing a Craftivist History’ (2011), for much pertinent and provocative information on radical knitting art, and also to Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch, ‘Craft Hard Die Free: Radical Curatorial Strategies for Craftivism’ (2011), both collected in Extra/ Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Buszek 2011).

Chapter 6 1. I’ve resisted the urge to coin public durational knitting PDK out of fear that I might get my PDKs and EWOs mixed up while doing my best effort to shed light on TKM. 2. Many thanks to my new colleague in Gothenburg, Katarina Andersson, for introducing me to Korsnäs sweaters. 3. And further thanks to Jools Gilson for her introduction to Cirkus Cirkör. Cirkus Cirkör Knitting Peace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUq2t65jlr8, accessed June 12, 2018. 4. Untitled (Pink Tube) is constructed with crochet rather than knitting. Both knitting and crochet techniques can create cloth from a single strand of yarn. Knitting uses needles to hold loops of yarn, while crochet uses a hook to loop one loop to the next. Knitting typically unravels faster than crochet. 5. http://boulderarts.org/experiments-in-public-art/about/

Endnotes   194

Chapter 7 1. The technology that was part of imagining The Knitting Map had been part of half/ angel’s performance and installation practice for ten years prior to 2005: [t]his work with technology allowed us to haunt performance and installation with unsettling connections between gestures and voiced text or music. In The Lios (2004), gallery visitors moved their hands in pools of water to trigger recordings of a community remembering the sea, as if memory itself were dissolved in water. In The Secret Project (1999), dancers moved and spoke poetic texts while producing another layer of the same text with their movement, so that they and the audience became unsettled by a vocal and corporeal plurality, and time itself seemed troubled. If we had not spent a decade refining this kind of work, we could not have imagined The Knitting Map in which a city and its weather generated knitting stitches and wool colour. (Gilson 2012: 11)

2. For example, on the remounting of the map, a local newspaper article begins as follows, rehearsing the tropes of cost and loss and literal interpretation: “The longlost knitted map of Cork, which cost the taxpayer €259,000 a decade ago, is being taken out of storage and dusted down for its first public display in seven years” (English 2015: n. p.). 3. This line is from the opening scene of Hamlet, where the night guards wait for the reappearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. It reminds us that the nightly appearance of the players performing a playtext is a haunting – the text is a ghostly outline of what the performance can become, not just an object of literature. The text is a ghostly trace of past, present and future iterations of that thing, which may or may not appear again on any given night. This is a well-worn issue in theatre and performance studies and is the title of Freddie Rokem’s essay elaborating on this ghosting. See also Marvin Carlson’s further discussion of the ghostly nature of theatre performance. 4. Consider this sensibility wrapped in the meaning of purl from the Oxford English Dictionary: “1. A small stream or rill flowing with a swirling motion; a runnel, a rivulet. . . . 2. The action or sound of water or another liquid flowing in this manner; a murmur, a gurgle. Also in extended use, of the breath.” 5. The digital realm continues to elaborate further iterations of threads with email threads, or comment or conversation threads on various platforms. 6. Through a consideration of the various tasks of embroidery, knitting and writing, Ingold argues that: “Threads may be transformed into traces and traces into threads. It is through the transformation of threads into traces, I argue, that surfaces are brought into being. And conversely, it is through the transformation of traces into threads that surfaces are dissolved” (20).

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7. Ingold writes: As with the woven tapestry, when we look for the text-line we do not find it. It exists neither as a visible trace nor as a thread. Rather, it emerges through the progressive lengthwise displacement of the letter-line as it oscillates up and down within a determinate “bandwidth” (though with many trailing ends), in much the same way that the woven stripe is built up through the longitudinal displacement of the weft as it oscillates transversely between selected warp lines. In the fifteenth-century Gothic book-hand known as textura, this parallel was drawn quite explicitly: the hand was so-called on account of the resemblance of a page of writing to the texture of a woven blanket. Just as the letter-line had its figurative source in the weaver’s yarn, so the prototype for the straight, ruled lines of the manuscript, between which the letters were arrayed, lay in the warp strings stretched taut on the loom. (2010: 34)

8. It is beyond the scope of this essay to deal with this in particular reference to the use of technologies in replicating a smoothness in representation, but see, for example, Steve Dixon’s discussion of use of disruptive possibilities of technology, and in particular his discussion of half/angel practices in this regard (2007: 638). 9. Gilson writes: Our understanding of processes of cartography assumed a poetic plurality. Our map wasn’t literal, because such literality would not have allowed us space to be playful with how cartographic energies depict all kinds of geographies, from the tone of laughter of the cartographer, to how Mary was late on that Tuesday, to the vast impossible secrets of the complexity of knitting, to the floods in March, and the snow in November, and the heat of August, and the lull in October, to Ciara’s poor tension, and Maura’s cable, and nobody cleaned the toilets on Sunday so I had to do it before I could change the wool for Monday, to the valuing of women’s lives and community, to the ferocity of some of the press, to people crossing oceans solely to visit us, to indignant men arriving surprised at quiet industry, to the way we laughed so hard we wet our knickers at Elizabeth’s leaving do, to the neighbours getting upset, to drums playing, and scones being eaten, to fury and love, and tears, and tension of all kinds, and love, and love. And women in Philadelphia weeping at the sight of it. (2012: 10)

10. The concerted branding of the West of Ireland as a wild open space for touristic self-­discovery had been branded as “The Wild Atlantic Way” (see http://www .wildatlanticway.com/home).

Endnotes   196

Chapter 9 1. These costumes were knitted primarily by Project Manager Kate O’Brien and Project Coordinator Susan Tector Sands as well as volunteer knitters such as Marian O’Sullivan. 2. There is a relatively new term, ‘immersive theatre’, but such theatrical experiments are nothing new; in fact many formal theatre spaces are now turning themselves over to such a thing (as with the recent 2017 production of The Great Gatsby at the Gate Theatre in Dublin). 3. ‘Still’ is a noun, verb, adjective and adverb . . . It is hard to resist playing with that . . . 4. This building was the (then) newly renovated Cork Civic Trust House, a cultural centre, which now houses the offices of theatre companies, festivals and other arts initiatives. 5. This was Oisín O’Neill, the son of close friends of Jools Gilson, about which she made a radio documentary for RTÉ (Ireland’s national broadcasting organi­sation) in 2011. Listen here: http://www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone/2011/1019/646883-radio -documentary-oisins-story-prader-willi/

Chapter 12 1. This is not to say that crafting has not been politicised and used to convey party political messages. From trade union banners to the recent Women’s March on Washington and the widespread making and wearing of the ‘pussy hat’, crafting has made statements. Too often, though, these are women-centric, which to a certain extent negates the acceptance of crafts practice into serious political debate. 2. There has been considerable recent research into the benefits of crafting and particularly knitting to mental health. See, for example, Hosie (2016) and Matthews (2016). Knitting as a form of therapy and/or means of recuperation had also been employed in hospitals following the Crimean War, as it requires both dexterity and concentration, and progress – rows knitted – is easily measurable, marking the journey from sickness to health. 3. Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, was a mathematician and cited as the inventor of the binary computer code. See Toole (1992). 4. One might also add the future here too, as one considers how one wishes to be remembered. 5. The projection of ‘worth’ has been addressed thoroughly by Jessica Hemmings in this book. By considering what artists do with their knitting once a project is complete is illuminating, and an opportunity to reflect on what happens to The Knitting Map next. The abandonment of knitting in cupboards and other hidden places seems unbefitting to any work of art, whilst the unravelling offers an equally painful death, albeit a punctuation mark.

Endnotes   197

Chapter 13 1. The original proposal for The Knitting Map had a satellite, which looked down at the movement in Cork City. 2. In the period immediately following my break with half/angel, I was focused on two projects with the other company with which I had been involved (and from which I had taken a leave of absence for 2004–2005): Aune Head Arts. These two projects, Women in Farming and Triparks, commissioned artists to work in rural communities, specifically within an agricultural context and within national parks. I largely took the role as Executive Producer on these projects, but ultimately became involved in leading on the technical realisation of some of them.

Endnotes   198

REFERENCES

Acknowledgments Brumbeau, Jeff & Gail de Marcken (2001) The Quiltmaker’s Gift. Gosford, Australia: Scholastic Australia. Gilson-Ellis, Jools & Deborah Barkun (2011) ‘Choreographed Cartography: Translation, Feminized Labor and Digital Literacy in half/angel’s The Knitting Map’. Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, Digital Commons @ University of Nebraska, Lincoln. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent .cgi?article=1008;context=tsaconf Larson Line, Joanne & Gail de Marcken (2000) Quilts from the Quiltmaker’s Gift. London & New York: Scholastic Press. McCarthy, Kieran (2005) Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks. Dublin: Nonsuch Publishing.

Preface Gilson, Jools (2012) ‘Navigation, Nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map: A series of navigational directions . . .’ Performance Research 17.1: 9–20.

Introduction Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome (1996), ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, by Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome (ed.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 3-25. Creed, Barbara (1993), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (1989), ‘Some Statements and Truisms About Neologisms, New-isms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms’, Trans. by Anne Tomiche, in The States of “Theory”: History, Art and Critical Discourse, by Carroll, David (ed.), New York: Columbia University Press, 63-94. Derrida, Jacques (1994), Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, Trans. by Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge. English, Eoin (2015), ‘Controversial Knitting Map being dusted down for public display,’ Irish Examiner, 9 January: n. p. Mythen, Katie (2005), ‘An Army of Knutters!’, Inside Cork, 17 March: 10. Phelan, Peggy (1997), Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, New York: Routledge.

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Chapter 1 Alioth, Martin (2005) ‘Ire zu sein ist immer unbequem,’ Der Standard, Vienna, Austria, 9 January: 35. Anderson, W. S. B. (1995) RYA International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea. Shaftesbury: Blackmore Press. Andreassen, Helene (2005) ‘Folkelig Strikkeprosject Engasjerte Cork,’ Stavanger Aftenblad, Stavanger, Norway, 15 October: 59. Andrews, J. H. (2008) The Queen’s Last Mapmaker: A Study of Richard Bartlett. Dublin: Geography Publications. Barkun, Deborah & Jools Gilson-Ellis (2007) ‘Orienteering with Double Moss: The Cartographies of half/ angel’s The Knitting Map,’ International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media, 3, 2: 183–95. Barkun, Deborah, Jools Gilson-Ellis, & Richard Povall (2007) half/angel: The Knitting Map (Cork, Ireland & Millersville, PA: University College Cork, Arts Council Ireland, Culture Ireland & Millersville University [exhibition catalogue]). Bliss, Debbie (1999) How to Knit. London: Collins & Brown. Bradley, Debora (2005) ‘Knit One, Purl Fun!’ Simply Knitting, July: 98. Buckley, Dan (2004) ‘Cultural Crown That Promises Us Riches,’ Irish Examiner, 4 March: 11. Cairns, David & Shaun Richards (1988) Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism & Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Culiffe, Tom (1994) Navigation: An RYA Manual. London: David & Charles. Davis, R. (2005) ‘Old and New Knits City T ­ ogether,’ BBC News website, 7 March, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk _news/northern_ireland/4324955.stm. Accessed 14 Sept 2017. Dillon, Willie (2004) ‘City of Culture: It’s Not Rubbish,’ The Irish Independent, 4 September: 4. Gilson-Ellis, Jools (2002) Spinstren, half/angel performance text [unpublished]. Glancey, Jonathan (2005) ‘The Word Made Flesh,’ The Guardian, 22 August: 32, www.guardian.co.uk/artand design/2005/aug/22/architecture.communities. Accessed 3 Sept 2017. Guilcher, Martine (2005) ‘Cork, l’Irlande en Fête,’ Newzy.fr, 1 October. Fawcett, Sarah (2005) ‘The Knitting Map,’ Vogue Knitting, Fall: 65. Friel, Brian (1981) Translations. London: Faber & Faber. Lynch, Donal (2005) ‘Sunk,’ Life supplement, Sunday Independent, 22 May: 25–30. Matthews, Anne (1984) Vogue Dictionary of Knitting Stitches. London: David & Charles. McCarthy, Kieran ed. (2005) Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks. Dublin: Nonsuch. McCarthy, Tom (2005) ‘The Box Over the Bed,’ In McCarthy, K. (ed.) Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, pp. 123–4. Dublin: Nonsuch. Mythen, Katie (2005) ‘An Army of Knutters!’ I­ nside Cork, 17 March: 10. O’Riordan, Alan (2006) ‘Attempt to Unravel Knitting Map,’ The Irish Examiner, 29 June: 13. Panków, Lidia (2006) ‘Miasto Wedlug ­Drutów,’ Wysokie Obcasy, Warsaw, Poland, 10 Septem-ber: 38–39. RYA Coastal Skipper & Yachtmaster Offshore E ­ xercises 1995/6 (1995) London: Royal Yachting Association [no author credited]. (This article was originally published in Performance Research 17.1: 9–20.) Sipilä, Annamari (2005) ‘Kaupungin Kiire Kudo­taan Kartaksi,’ Helsingen Sannomat, Helsinki, Finland, 2 January: C3. Smyth, William J. (2007) ‘Map-Making and Ireland: Presences and Absences,’ [c]artography: Map-Making as Art Form, pp. 4–27. Cork: Crawford Art Gallery. Sotelo, Luis C. (2009) Participation Cartography: Performance, Space and Subjectivity. PhD Thesis, Northampton (unpublished). The Knitting Map Log (2005) Cork, half/angel [unpublished, various authors]. Tovey, Hilary, Perry Share & Mary P. Corcoran (2007) A Sociology of Ireland, 3rd edition. London: Gill & Macmillan.

Chapter 2 Arnold, Bruce (1991) Mainie Jellett and the Modern Movement in Ireland. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

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Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Barber, Fionna (2013) Art in Ireland Since 1910. London: Reaktion Books. Barkun, Deborah & Jools Gilson-Ellis (2007) ‘Orienteering with Double Moss: The Cartographies of half/angel’s The Knitting Map,’ International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 3:2–3, 183–195. Bishop, Claire (2005) Installation Art: A Critical History. London: Routledge. Bishop, Claire (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso. Bourriaud, Nicolas (1998) Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses du Réel. Carden, Siún (2014) ‘Cable Crossings: the Aran Jumper as Myth and Merchandise,’ Costume 48:2, 260–275. Casey, Edward S. (2002) Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. European Commission, European Capitals of Culture: More Than 30 Years, https://ec.europa.eu/programmes /creative-europe/sites/creative-europe/files/library/ecoc-fact-sheet_en.pdf. Accessed 1 August 2017. Fowler, Joan (1990) ‘Speaking of Gender: Expressionism, Feminism and Sexuality,’ In A New Tradition: Irish Art of the Eighties, exh.cat. Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, 53–67. Hardesty, Pamela (2015) ‘Stitch in Time: The Fabric of Contemporary Life,’ Textile, 13:3, 296–299. Ingold, Tim (2010) ‘Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials,’ NCRM (National Centre for Research Methods) Working Paper, University of Manchester. Kerrigan, J. (2005) ‘Busy Today: All the Time You’re Aware That You’re Part of Something Huge,’ Irish Examiner, 24 October, 8. Kester, Grant (2004) Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. London: University of California Press. Long, D. (2014) ‘Installation Art,’ In Catherine Marshall and Peter Murray (eds.) Art and Architecture of Ireland, vol.5, Twentieth Century. Dublin, New Haven and London: Yale University Press for Royal Irish Academy and the Paul Mellon Centre, 228–231. Lynch, Donal (2005), ‘Sunk,’ Life Magazine, Sunday Independent, 22 May, 25–27. Nash, Catherine (1996), ‘Reclaiming Vision: Looking at Landscape and the Body,’ Gender, Place and Culture 3:2, 149–170. Purbrick, L. (2004), ‘The Architecture of Containment,’ In D. Wylie (ed.) The Maze. London: Granta, 91–110. Roederer, Thomas (2005), ‘Knitty-Gritty of Cork Culture,’ Evening Echo, 6 July, 10–11. Starmore, Alice (1997/ 2010), Aran Knitting: New and Expanded Version. Mineola NY: Dover Publications.

Chapter 3 Barkun, Deborah and Gilson, Jools (2010), ‘Choreographed Cartography: Translations, Feminized Labor, and Digital Literacy in Half/Angel’s The Knitting Map,’ Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu.tsaconf/9. Accessed 22 March 2017. Barnes, Ben (2008), Plays and Controversies: Abbey Theatre Diaries 2000–2005. Dublin, Carysfort Press. Clancy, Luke (2015), ‘Culture File – Cork’s Knitting Map at The Glucksman,’ RTE Lyric FM, 30 April. Connolly, Lydia (2005), ‘Get Your Needles and Get Knitting,’ Evening Echo, 11 January: 6. Cork 2005 (2003), [Press Release] ‘Eight Down, Ninety to Go as Capital of Culture Announces First Contracted Projects,’ 31 July, http://www.cork2005.ie/news_archive/press_releases/eightdown.shtml. Accessed 19 January 2017. English, Eoin (2015), ‘Controversial Knitting Map Being Dusted Down for Public Display,’ Irish Examiner, 9 January: n. p. Gilson, Jools (2012), ‘Navigation, Nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map,’ Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 17 (1): 8–19. Gilson, Jools (2015), ‘Controversial? Not At All, Knitting Map Was a Success,’ Evening Echo, 13 May: n. p. Kelleher, Sarah (2015), ‘The Knitting Map: Art, Community, Controversy and Stitch in Time: The Fabric of Modern Life, Glucksman Gallery, 3 April–5 July 2015,’ Paper Visual Art Journal, 2 December. http:// papervisualart.com/2015/12/02/the-knitting-map-art-community-controversy-and-stitch-in-time-the -fabric-of-modern-life-glucksman-gallery-3-april%E2%80%935-july-2015. Accessed 19 January 2017. Kerrigan, J. (2005), ‘All the Time You’re Aware That You’re Part of Something Huge,’ Irish Examiner, 24 October: 8.

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Leland, Mary (2005), ‘A Day in the Life of the Capital,’ Irish Times, 2 May: n. p. Lippard, Lucy (2019), ‘Busywork: The Real Thing,’ Textiles, Community and Controversy: The Knitting Map. London: Bloomsbury. Lynch, Donal (2005), ‘Sunk,’ Life supplement, Sunday Independent, 22 May: 25–30. McCarthy, Kieran (2005), Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks. Dublin: Nonsuch. McCarthy, Tom (2005), ‘The Box Over the Bed’, in Kieran McCarthy, Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, Dublin: Nonsuch, 123–124. McInerney, Sarah (2005), ‘World Record Looms as These Cork Knitters Redraw the Map,’ Sunday Tribune, 6 March: n. p. McLoughlin, Gerry (2005), ‘Diary,’ Inside Cork, 23 June: 34–35. McNally, Frank (2005), ‘The People’s Republic,’ Irish Times Weekend Review, 11 June: n. p. McNamee, Joe (2005), ‘The Knit Pickers,’ Irish Examiner, 21 December: 12–13. Mythen, Katie (2005), ‘The Knitty-Gritty on Cork’s New Record,’ Inside Cork, 10 March: n. p. Mythen, Katie (2005), ‘An Army of Knutters!’ Inside Cork, 17 March: 10. Murphy, Anna (2005), ‘A Knitted Record of Cork City,’ RTÉ News [broadcast], 24 August. O’Brien, Edna (1978) [1976], Mother Ireland: A Memoir. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. O’Connor, S. (2015), ‘The Knitting Map Symposium: Art, Community and Controversy,’ 14 May. https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=UQeotz4dFIg. (Part 1) and, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NNcX-u8O2Y. (Part 2) Accessed 19 January 2017. O’Riordan, Alan (2006), ‘Attempt to Unravel the Knitting Map,’ Irish Examiner, 29 June: 13. O’Sullivan, J. (2005), RTE Nationwide [broadcast], 24 August. Pocock, Iva (2005), ‘What a Yarn,’ Irish Times Magazine, 29 January: 8. People’s Republic of Cork (2005) [chat room] 26 August [19 January 2017]. Quinn, Bernadette and O’Halloran, Elaine (2006), ‘Cork 2005: An Analysis of Emerging Cultural Legacies’ [report], DIT, http://rich.dit.ie/documents/cork05.pdf. Accessed 26 June 2017. Roederer, Thomas (2005), ‘Knitty-Gritty of Cork Culture,’ Evening Echo, 6 July: n. p. Ryan, Vera (2005), ‘Why Silence Critics of the City of Culture?,’ Irish Examiner: Letters to the Editor, 17 June: 16. Shaw, George Bernard (2003) [1932], Too True to Be Good [ebook], Project Gutenberg, http://gutenberg.net.au /ebooks03/0300591h.html. Accessed 10 August 2017. Sheridan, Colin (2005), ‘Putting City on the Knitting Map,’ Irish Examiner, 2 May: n. p. Sheridan, Colin (2015), ‘A Stitch in Time Still Stirs Debate at UCC’s Glucksman Gallery,’ Irish Examiner, 6 May: n. p. Steinem, Gloria (2016), Marian Finucane, RTE Radio 1 [interview], 23 July.

Chapter 4 Auther, Elissa (2010) String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bonansinga, Kate (2008) ‘Unknitting: Some Background,’ In Anne M Giangiulio (ed.) Unknitting: Challenging Textile Traditions, Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, University of Texas at El Paso, 8–11 [Exhibition Catalogue]. Black, Anthea & Nicole Burisch (2011) ‘Craft Hard Die Free: Radical Curatorial Strategies for Craftivism,’ In Maria Elena Buszek (ed.) Extra/Ordinary: Craft Culture and Contemporary Art. Durham: Duke University Press, 204–221. Buszek, Maria Elena, ed. (2011) Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press. Giangiulio, Anne M., ed. (2008) Unknitting: Challenging Textile Traditions, Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, University of Texas at El Paso [Exhibition Catalogue]. Gilson-Ellis, Jools (2005) ‘Introduction,’ In Kieran McCarthy (ed.) Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks. Dublin: Nonsuch, 11–12 Gilson, Jools (2012) ‘Navigation, Nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map,’ Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 17 (1): 8–19.

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Chapter 5 Anzaldúa, Gloria (1999), Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Austin, J. L. (1975), How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. Urmson, J. and Sbisà, M. (eds.). Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1988), Limited Inc. Trans. Weber, S. and Mehlman, J. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Gaiman, Neil (2004), American Gods. London: Headline Review. Gilson, Jools (2012), ‘Navigation, Nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map: A Series of Navigational Directions . . .’ Performance Research, 17 (1), 8–19. Harmon, Katherine and Clemans, Gayle (2009), The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography. New York: Princeton ­Architectural Press. Huffman, Nicholas J. (1997), ‘Charting the Other Maps: Cartography and Visual Methods in Feminist Research,’ In Jones III, John Paul, Nast, Heidi J., and Roberts, Susan M. (eds.) Thresholds in Feminist Geography: Difference, Methodology, Representation. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. 255–283. Kearney, Richard (2003), Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness. London: Routledge. Mehretu, Julie (2016), ‘Notes on Painting,’ In Graw, Isabelle, and Lajer-Burcarth, Ewa (eds.) Painting Beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition. Berlin: Steinberg Press. 270–277. Moffat, Graham (1911), Bunty Pulls the Strings. London: Samuel French. Oldfield, Molly and Mitchinson, John (2014), ‘QI: How Knitting Was Used as Code in WW2?’ The Telegraph, 18 February. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/qi/10638792/QI-how-knitting-was-used-as-code -in-WW2.html. Accessed 1 November 2015. Perkins, Christopher (2009), ‘Performative and Embodied Mapping,’ In Kitchin, R. and Thrift, N. (eds.) International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography. London: Elsevier. Sherlock, Steve (2014), The Performativity of Value: On the Citability of Cultural Commodities. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Shire, Warsan (2011), ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre),’ In Shire, Warsan (ed.) Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. London: mouthmark series. Shire, Warsan (2011), ‘Grandfather’s Hands,’ In Shire, Warsan (ed.) Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. London: mouthmark series. Shire, Warsan (2015), ‘What They Did Yesterday Afternoon’ [blog post]. http://www.crowspirit.org.uk/what-they -did-yesterday-afternoon-by-warsan-shire. Accessed 31 January 2017. Van Duyker, Linda (2006), ‘Haiku’ [unpublished poem].

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Chapter 6 Adey, Katherine (2016), ‘Knitting Identities: Creativity and Community Amongst Women Hand Knitters in Edinburgh,’ PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh. Cirkus Cirkör Knitting Peace, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUq2t65jlr8 accessed 12 June 2018. Cole, Dave (2005), ‘Dave Cole: The Knitting Machine’ [video], https://vimeo.com/28618663. Accessed 10 Jan 2017. Cole, Dave (2017), email correspondence with the author, 15 Feb 2017. Collins, Liz (2015), Skype interview with the author, 18 Nov 2015. Gschwandtner, Sabrina (2008), ‘Statement of Practice: Knitting Is . . .’ The Journal of Modern Craft, 1 (2): 271–278. Corkhill, Betsan, Jessica Hemmings, Angela Maddock, and Jill Riley (2014), ‘Knitting and Well-Being,’ Textile, 12 (1): 34–57. Esselström, Lee (2016), ‘Korsnäströjan lever än’, https://svenska.yle.fi/artikel/2016/11/10/korsnastrojan-lever. Accessed 20 Jan 2017. Gilson, Jools (2012) ‘Navigation, nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map: A series of navigational directions . . .’ Performance Research 17 (1): 9–20. Hemmings, Jessica (2012), Warp & Weft: Woven Textiles in Fashion, Art and Interiors. London: Bloomsbury. Hernando, Ana María (2016), Skype interview with the author, December 10, 2016. Hernando, Ana María (2016), ‘“Knitting Ballet” by Ana Maria Hernando’ [video], http://boulderarts.org /experiments-in-public-art/about/. Accessed 10 Dec 2016. Hessy, Alya (2016), interview with the author, ­Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 13 Dec 2016. Hessy, Alya (2017), ‘Over and Under’ [video], http://www.alyahessy.com/portfolio-item/over-and-under/. Accessed 19 Jan 2017. Ingold, Tim (2010), ‘Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials,’ ESRC National Centre for Research Methods NCRM Working Paper Series 05/10: 1–14. Just, Kate (2017), http://katejust.com/hope-safe/ accessed 20 January 2017, and http://www.katejust.com /public-knitting-projects/ accessed 12 June 2018. Leader, Darian (2009), The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression. London: Penguin. Maddock, Angela (2015), Skype interview with the author, 7 Oct 2015. Miller, Dutes and Shellabarger, Stan (2015), Skype ­interview with the author, 7 Oct 2015. Mingwei, Lee (2014), ‘Lee Mingwei: The Mending Project 2009’ [video for the exhibition ‘Lee Mingwei and His Relations,’ Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, filmed by Araki Takahisa]. Mingwei, Lee (2017), ‘Projects’, http://www.leemingwei.com/projects.php. Accessed 20 Jan 2017. Peers, Juliette (2014), ‘Knitting Signals’, http://www.katejust.com/hope-safe/. Accessed 12 March 2017. Pym, Celia (2015), Skype interview with the author, 12 Oct 2015. Vander Kooij, Andrea (2015), Skype interview with the author, 16 Nov 2015. Szabó, Zsuzsanna (2016), email correspondence with the author, 1 Jan 2017. Szabó, Zsuzsanna (2017), ‘Marcel Wanders Design Award 2016 Goes to a Fashion Design Collection from MOME’, http://www.mome.hu/en/news-en/1480-a-idei-marcel-wanders-design-award-f?d%C3%ADját -mome-n-készült-divatkollekció-nyerte-2. Accessed 19 Jan 2017.

Chapter 7 Adams, Paul C., Hoelscher, Steven and Till, Karen E. (eds.) (2001), Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Boland, Eavan (1994), ‘That the Science of Cartography Is Limited,’ In In a Time of Violence. Manchester: Carcanet, 6–7.

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Carlson, Marvin (2001), The Haunted Stage. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Casey, Edward S. (2005), Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dixon, Steve (2007), Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art and Installation. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. English, Eoin (2015), ‘Controversial Knitted Map of Cork Being Dusted Down for Public Display,’ The Irish Examiner, 9 January, https://tinyurl.com/lvraej5. Accessed 7 March 2017. Gilson, Jools (2012), ‘Navigation, Nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map: A Series of Navigational Directions . . .’ Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 17 (1): 9–20. Foley, Catherine (2001), ‘Perceptions of Irish Step Dance: National, Global, and Local,’ Dance Research Journal, 33 (1): 34–45. Haraway, Donna (1991), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Ingold, Tim (2010), ‘Transformations of the Line: Traces, Threads and Surfaces,’ Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 8 (1): 10–35. Manning, Erin (2009), Relationscapes. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Morrison, J’aime (2002), ‘Irish Choreo-Cinema: Dancing at the Crossroads of Language and Performance,’ The Yale Journal of Criticism, 15(1): 173–184. O’Connor, S. (2015), ‘The Knitting Map Symposium: Art, Community and Controversy,’ 14 May. https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=UQeotz4dFIg. (Part 1) and, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NNcX-u8O2Y. (Part 2) Accessed 19 January 2017. Shakespeare, William [1602] (1998), ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,’ In Wells, S. and Taylor, G. (eds.) William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 653–690. Phelan, Peggy (1997), Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. London and New York: Routledge. Rokem, Freddie (1994), ‘What, Has This Thing Appeared Again Tonight?’ Theatre Research International, (19) 2: 143–147. Theodores, Diana (1996), ‘A Dance Critic in Ireland,’ Dance Chronicle, 19 (2): 191–211.

Chapter 8 Barkun, Deborah and Gilson, Jools (2010), ‘­Choreographed Cartography: Translation, Feminized Labor, and Digital Literacy in half/angel’s The Knitting Map,’ Textile Society of America Proceedings, http://digitalcommons .unl.edu/tsaconf/9/. Accessed 9 January 2012. Byrne, Donal (2004), ‘The Knitting Map,’ Irish Examiner, 8 Oct: 4. Dillon, Willie (2004), ‘City of Culture: It’s Not Rubbish,’ The Irish Independent, 4 Sept: 4. Dineen, Kieran (2012), ‘Where Is Cork’s €258K Knitting Map?,’ Evening Echo, 9 June: 1. Lippard, Lucy (1997), Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lynch, Donal (2005), ‘Sunk,’ Sunday Independent, Life supplement, 22 May: 25–30. McFadden, David Revere (2007), ‘Knitting and Face: Radical and Subversive?’ In Jennifer Steifle Edwards, Jennifer Scanlan, and David Revere McFadden (eds.) Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting, 8–19. New York: Museum of Arts and Design. Mythen, Katie (2005), ‘An Army of Knutters!’ Inside Cork, 17 March: 10.

Chapter 9 Sweeney, Bernadette (2008) Performing the Body in Irish Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sweeney, Bernadette & Marie Kelly (eds.) (2010) The Theatre of Tom Mac Intyre: Strays from the Ether. Dublin: Carysfort. Sontag, Susan (1973 [2005]) On Photography. New York: Penguin. Phelan, Peggy (1993) Unmarked, the Politics of Performance. London, Routledge. Pocock, Iva (2005) ‘What a Yarn,’ Irish Times Magazine, 29 January: 8.

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Chapter 10 Attfield, Judy (2000), Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg Press. Baylis, Gail (2007), ‘Technologies and Cultures: Robert J. Welch’s Western Landscapes, 1895–1914,’ In Breathnach, Ciara (ed.) Framing the West, Images of Rural Ireland, 1891–1920, 77–98. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Ingold, Tim (2013), Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge. Irish Countrywomen’s Association (2014), Books of Crafts. Cork: Mercier Press. McCarthy, Kieran (2005), Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks. Dublin: Nonsuch Ireland. Schama, Simon (1995), Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage Books. Simms, Anngret (2000), ‘Perspectives on Irish Settlement Studies,’ In T. Barry (ed.) A History of Settlement in Ireland, 228–47. London: Routledge. Tuan, Yi-Fu (1974), Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Vogue Knitting (1954), ‘Photo Report on the Aran Sweater,’ Autumn/Winter, 4–5.

Chapter 11 Adamson, Glenn (2013) The Invention of Craft. London: Bloomsbury. Connolly, Lynda (2005) ‘It’s Plain and Purl as Cork Is Mapped Out,’ Evening Echo, 12 April: 3. Cronin, Olga (2005) ‘Knitting Map to Cast off on Euro Tour,’ Evening Echo, 9 Aug: 6. Degen, N. (2013) The Market. London: White-chapel Art Gallery. Gschwandtner, Sabrina (2008) ‘Knitting Is . . .’ Journal of Modern Craft 1(2): 271–8. Harrod, Tanya (2013) The Real Thing. London: Hyphen Press. Kerrigan, J. (2005) ‘All the Time You’re Aware That You’re Part of Something Huge,’ Irish Examiner, 24 October: 8. Leland, Mary (2005) ‘A Day in the Life of the Capital,’ Irish Times, 2 May: n. p. Lynch, Donal (2005) ‘Sunk,’ Life supplement, Sunday Independent, 22 May: 25–30. McCarthy, Kieran (2005a) Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks. Dublin: Nonsuch. McCarthy, Kieran (2005b) ‘Our City, Our Town, Early Twentieth Century Adventures’ (part 67) [extract from McCarthy 2005a], Cork ­Independent, 17 November 2005: 17. McNamee, Joe (2005) ‘The Knit Pickers,’ Irish Examiner, 21 December: 12–13. McInerney, Sarah (2005) ‘World Record Looms as These Cork Knitters Redraw the Map,’ Sunday Tribune, 6 March: n. p. Mythen, Katie (2005a) ‘The Knitty-Gritty on Cork’s New Record,’ Inside Cork, 10 March: n. p. Mythen, Katie (2005b) ‘An Army of Knutters!’ Inside Cork, 17 March: 10. O’Brien, Kathryn (2005) ‘A Letter to the People of Cork,’ Cork Independent, 1 Dec. O’Riordan, Alan (2006) ‘Attempt to Unravel the Knitting Map,’ Irish Examiner, 29 June: 13. O’Sullivan, Mark (2005) ‘The Knit Pickers,’ Irish Examiner, Arts, 21 Dec: 13.

Chapter 12 Alexander, Lynn M. (2003), Women, Work, and Representation: Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Blackburn, Sheila (2013), A Fair Day’s Wage for a Fair Day’s Work? Sweated Labour and the Origins of Minimum Wage Legislation in Britain. Aldershot: Ashgate. Debord, Guy (1955), ‘Introduction a une Critique de la Geographie Urbaine,’ Les Levres Nues, 6: n. p. Deem, Rosemary (1982), ‘Women, Leisure and Inequality,’ Leisure Studies, 1 (1), 1982: 29–46. Duffy, Kathryn (2007), ‘Knitting Through Recovery One Stitch at a Time: Knitting as an Experiential Teaching Method for Affect Management in Group Therapy,’ Journal of Groups in Addiction and Recovery, 2 (1): 67–83. Fivush, Robin and Hayden, Catherine A., eds. (2003), Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self. Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Grant, Peter (2014), Philanthropy and Voluntary Action in the First World War: Mobilizing Charity. London: Routledge. References   206

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Chapter 13 Baudrillard, Jean (1988), ‘Simulacra and Simulations,’ In Poster, M. (ed.) Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, pp. 169–87. Cambridge: Polity Press 2001. Eakin, Emily (2003), ‘I Feel, Therefore I Am,’ New York Times, 19 April, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/19 /books/i-feel-therefore-i-am.html. Accessed 18 August 2017. Finlay, Klint (2012), ‘NASA Builds Your Own Private Satellite – With Google Android,’ Wired, August 28. https://www.wired.com/2012/08/phonesat/. Accessed 23 June 2017. Kagan, Jerome (1984), The Nature of the Child. New York: Basic Books. Office of Technology Assessment (1984), Remote Sensing and the Private Sector: Issues for Discussion. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment. Picard, Rosalind (2003), ‘Affective Computing: Challenges,’ International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 59: 55–64. Rosanoff, Martin André (1932), ‘Edison in His Laboratory,’ Harper’s Magazine, 165 (September): pp. 402–17. Temple Bell, Eric (1933), Numerology: The Magic of Numbers. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins. References   207

INDEX

1916 Rising Centenary, 42 2005 City of Culture, xi, 34, 37, 41–42 9/11, 78–79, 110 96 FM, 108 A Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 122 abortion, 24–25, 193 Abrams, Catherine, 188 absence, 62, 64, 67, 69, 103, 109 Adams, Paul C., 99 Adey, Kate, 79, 93 agency, 109, 113, 136 Ahern, Rachel, 189 Akter, Taslima, 186 Alaniz Lamez, Rosario, 187 Albers, Anni, 20 alchemy, 184 Alderson, Lynn, 56 Alex, (knitter), 187 Alexander Wilson, Susan, 185, 187–88 All Ireland Final, 40, 161, 163 Allen, Dympna, 186 Allen, Eileen, 188 Allen, Hazel, 187 Allen, Susan, 188 Allen, Vera, 188 Allshire, Maurice, 188 Allshire, William, 188 Alÿs, Francis, 25 Amer, Felicity, 187 analogue, 156, 166 Anderson, Ashley, 187 Andrews, Rachel, xiii, xiv Anglo-Normans, 135 anthropology, 166 Aran Islands, 29, 31 Aran sweaters, 29, 30, 35, 145–47

architecture, 138, 141 archive, 58, 60, 61, 97 Argentina, 90 Armstrong, Jann, 189 Arnold, B., 26 art, 109, 161, 169 community, xi, 37, 40, 41, 46, 134, 141, 150, 156 conceptual, 109, 112 contemporary, 34, 109–11, 113 feminist, 43, 63 fine, 161 installation, 113–114, 134, 144, 150 Irish, 18–32 landscape, x practice, 24, 95 theory artefact, 157, 183 Arts Council Ireland, vii, 42, 194 Arts Faculty, University College Cork, vii Artzone, 36 Ashley, Maureen, 189 Atkinson, Ena, 148, 187 Attfield, Judy, 144 Attridge, Eileen, 188 Auckland Art Gallery, NZ, 78 Auld, Louis, 188 Aune Head Arts, 178–79, 198, 227 Austin, J. L., 64 B balaclava, 162 Ballymacoda, Co. Cork, ix Band, Stephan, 187 Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, 170, 191

208

Barad, Karen, 22 Barber, Anne, 188 Barber, Fionna, xiii, 18–32, 183 Barford Ryan, Rebecca, 189 Barkun, Deborah, viii, xiv, 33–34, 161, 191 Barrett, Anne, 187 Barrett, Emer, 187 Barrett, Emily, 189 Barrett, Regina, 188 Barry, James, x Barry, Jo, 188 Barry, Kelly, 189 Barry, Samantha, 188 Barry, Sebastian, 37, 196 Barry, Sinead, 185, 187 Barry, Stella, 185–86 Barry, Valerie, 189 Barry Murphy, Emma, 189 Bartlett, Richard, 192 Batchelor, Leanne, 188 Bates, Ann, 187 Battersby, Eileen, 193 Baud, Laure, 189 Bauhaus, 20 Baylor, Audrey, 188 Baynes, Deirdre, 189 becoming, 60 Bekker, Avien, 190 Belarus, 149 Bell, Jeanette, 186 Beller, Miriam, 186 Benson, Lynn, 188 Benson, Sir John, 139 Berchmans, Sr. M., 186 Berger, John, 43 Berril, Liz, 190 Berriman, Amelia, 189

Bertolini Cullen, Enrika, vii, 143–44 Bessell, Nicola, 188 The Bible, 144 Big Knitted Welcome Mat (Kate Just), 85–86 Big Silver (Beverly Semmes), 23 Binglee, Pauline, 187 biography, 158–59, 163 of place, 159 Bishop, Clare, 23, 26 Blackley, Charlotte, 190 Blackley, Maggie, 190 Blanchere, Phil, 189 Bliss, Debbie, 5, 7 Bloodline (Angela Maddock), 82 Blount, Charles, 192 Blue Knitting (Celia Pym), 80–82 Boady, Noreen, 186 Bocher, Catherine, 190 bodies, 60–62, 68, 74, 101, 103, 105–7, 118, 145, 159, 184 Bogan, Kathleen, 187 Boland, Eavan, 101 Bolderink, Hannehe W. P., 187 Bolger, Anna, 189 Bolger, Jillian, 187 Boole Library, University College Cork, vii Visiting Speakers’ Fund, viii Bose, Elsie H., 190 boundaries, 157, 165, 168, 189 Bourgeois, Louise, 50 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 25 Bowen, Eily, 186 The Box Under the Bed, 15 Bradfield, Jo, 189 Breen, Breda, 189 Brennan, Deirdre, 187 Brennan, Maura, 189 Bridcut, Edith, 188 Britton, Patsy, 190 Broderick, Josephine, 186 Broderick, Josie, 186 Browne, Judith, 188 Browne, Mary, 190 Bruen, Barbara A., 148, 164, 185 Bruntse, Line, 114, 116 Bryant, Jane, 186 Buckley, Ann, 188 Buckley, Catherine, 185–86 Buckley, Dan, 7 Buckley, Louise, 189 Buckley, M. (knitter), 187 Buckley, Pauline, 185–86 Buckley, Sabrina, 188 Buckley, Sally, 185–86 Buckley, Sarah, 189 Buckley, Sarah Rose, 188 Buckley, William, 187 Bunty Pulls the Strings, 75

Bufacchi, Vittorio, ix, 10, 13 Burchill, Angela, 185–86 Burgess, Holly, 187 Burghard, Lilian, 189 Burke, Gemma, 190 Burke, Nellie, 189 Burke, Noelle, 189 buses, 142 Butler, Avril, 186 Butler, Brigid, 186 Butler, Frances, 189 Butler, Karla, 186 Byrne, Pauline, 189 Byrne, Valerie, vii, 140, 188 C cable knitting, 59, 61, 114, 182 electronics, 96, 105, 182 Cadogan, Helen, 189 Caidiz, Roger, 187 Cale, Breeda, 185, 189 California College of Arts, US, 79 California State University, US, viii Calvert, Heather, 189 Campbell, Belinda, viii Campbell, Nora, 186 Cannon, Ciara, 185 Cannon, Kathleen, 190 Cannon, Nuala, 185 Cape Town, South Africa, 60, 66, 75 Carden, S., 30 Carey, Anna, 188 Carey, Hanna, 185, 187 Carey, Hannah, 186 Carey, Margaret, 188 Carey, Niamh, 188 Carleton, Anne, 187 Carleton, Julie Ann, 185, 187 Carlin, Aoife, 40, 45 Carpenter, Ana, 187 Carpenter, Janet, 187 Carroll, Cona, 187 Carroll, Marie, 185, 186 Cartel, Kristell, 189 cartography, 3, 58, 95, 100–1, 103, 107, 110, 134, 137, 140, 166–67, 182 Carton, Madeleine, 189 Carty, Maura, 186 Carville, Dave, 188 Casey, Edward S., 26–27, 101 Casey, Lilian, 185, 188 Casey, Paul, ix Cashell, Honor, 186 Cashman, Angela, 189 Cashman, Johnny, 189 Cashman, Margaret, 189 Cashman, Marguerite, 187 Cashman, Martha, 188

Index   209

Cast Off, 53 Casting Off My Womb, 55 Catholic Church, 24, 164 Catholic nation, 28 Caucus, x Cave, Carol, 188 CCTV, 38, 102, 117, 167 Celtic Revival, 27 Celtic Tiger, 109, 173 Chamberlain, Franc, 189 Champ, Sarah G., 186 charity, 149, 160 Chemin, Yoel, 188 Chicago, Judy, 42 childhood, 163 choreography, 97–98, 114, 118 score, xiii, 97–98, 101, 107 Christopher (knitter), 187 Cip, Caroline, 186 The Clancy Brothers, 147 Clancy, Luke, 187 Clarke, Chris, vii, 19, 48 Clarke, Una, 185, 187 Cleary, Laura, 189 Cloke, Betty, 190 Coade, Danielle, 185–86 Coade, Susan, 187 Coady, Noreen, 185–86 Coakley, Hannah, 185, 188 Cobbaert, M. (knitter), 190 code, 67–68, 95, 99, 105, 107, 109, 120, 136 binary, 162 Codfier, Susan, 186 Cody, Nora, 186 Cogan, Teresa, 185–86 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, xv Cole, Dave, 55, 88–90 Cole, Jean, 190 Coleman, Bearden, 188 Coleman, Claire, 188 Coleman, Karen, 189 collectivism, 169 Collens, Nadine, 190 Collins, Aine, 188 Collins, Breeda, 186 Collins, Liz, 52, 86–88, 92, 94 Collins, Rita, 185–86 Collins, Sheila, 189 Combonos, Amelia, 188 communication, 158–59 community, x, 40, 41, 59, 100–1, 104, 106, 113, 116–17, 134–35, 139, 140, 145, 148, 156, 161, 164, 166 computing, 162 Conceptualism, 112 Condon, Betty, 186 Condon, Julie, 189 Condon, Rachel, 189

Condry, Hannah, 188 conflict, 37 Congested Districts Board, 146 Conlon, Kay, 188 Conlon, Rose, 148, 185 A Connemara Village (Paul Henry), 28 Connolly, Eilis, 188 Connolly, Rita, 190 Connolly O’Sullivan, Marie Claire, 189 Connolly O’Sullivan, Mary, 189 Conroy, Bridget, 189 context, 99, 120, 156 controversy, 14, 34, 46, 163, 182, 193 Conway, Mags, 186 Conway, Marguerite, 186 Conway, Sean, 188 Cooney, Anne, 188 Cooney, Maureen, 188 coptic circle, 143–44 Corcadorca Theatre Company, 41, 43 Corcoran, Ciona, 187 Corcoran, Leanne, 185–86 Corcoran, Maire, 187 Cork City, xv, 20 Cork City Arts Office, vii Cork City Council, 184 Cork City of Culture 2005, xii Cork City Gaol Heritage Centre, 142–43 Cork City Hall, vii, 20, 149 Cork City Library, vii Cork Film Festival, 35, 111 Cork School of Music, 45 Cork Tourism Strategic Policy Committee, 150 Cork Vision Centre, 135 Cork Women’s Poetry Circle, 15 Corkery, Brid, 187 Cornell, Shelly, 188 corruption, 164, 193 Costello, Ciara, 189 Costello, Patricia, 186 cottage industry, 158 Cotter, Alby, 188 Cotter, Dolores, 187 Cotter, Jemma, 187 Cotter, Llana, 186 Cotter, Maura, 185 Cough, Rachel, 189 Coughlan, Dymphna, 189 Council of Europe, Arts & Culture, 192 countryside, 164, 182 County Carlow, Ireland, 148 Coveney, Lydia, 189 Cox, Sandra, 186 craft, 37, 46, 134 feminine, 167 traditional, 44 Craft Cartel, 55 craftiness, 158

craftsmanship, 148 Crawford College of Art and Design, 37, 44 Crawford Gallery, Cork, vii, x, 141–42 Crean, Mona, 186 Creaner, Geraldine, 185 Creaner, Sinead, 185 Creed, Barbara, xiii Creed-Myles, Ruadhan, 187 Creedon, Conal, 43 Creedon, Kathleen, 185–86 Cremin, Sarah, 185, 188 crochet, 144 Cronin, Annie, 188 Cronin, Caroline, 189 Cronin, Elizabeth, 187 Cronin, Helen Z., 186 Cronin, Lauren, 189 Cronin, Margaret, 186 Cross, Dorothy, 24 Crowley, Carole, 185, 189 Crowley, Fergal, 188 Crowley, Fionnula, 190 Crowley, Juliet, 189 Crowley, Laura, 187 Crowley, Maureen, 185 Crowley, Peg, 190 Crowley, Tadhg, vii Cullen, Dorlas, 187 Cullen, E., 186 Cullen, Margot, 185–86 culture, 161 Culture Ireland, vii Cummins, Dolores, 185, 187 Cummins, Pauline, 30 Cunningham, Teresa, 185, 188 Curran, Merisa, 186 Cuthbart, Chloe, 189 cyborg, xiv, 97–98, 101, 103, 105–6 cyborgian, xiv D Dacy, Grainna, 187 Dada, 26 Dale, Jane, 186 Daly, Lilian, 185, 188 Dame, Jillian, 187 dance, 38, 45–46, 74, 97, 98, 104–6, 118 Irish, 105 Dance City, Newcastle, UK, 192 D’Arcy, Mary, 186 Darmody, Maryann, 185 Darmooly, Theresa, 189 Dartmoor, UK, 178 Dartnell, Christina, 186 Daughty, Marian, 190 Davies, Ann, 189 Davies, Hilary, 190

Index   210

Davis, Mary, 189 Davis, Vivienne, 187 de Barra, Eileen, 188 de Chantal Ryan, Sister, 185, 187 de Gramer, Helena, 190 de Groote, Jan, 188 de Lacey, Emma, 188 de Lourde Keane, Sister, 188 de Valera, Éamon, 28 Dean, Tacita, 43 Deasy, Mari, 189 death, 141 Debord, Guy, 166 Deeney, Kit, 187 Deerey, Kia, 185, 187 Deets, David, 188 Defarge, Madame, 55, 158, 168 Dehon, Elizabeth, 188 Delaney, Paula, 189 Delea, Alice, 186 Deleuze, Gilles, 21 Deller, Jeremy, 20 Dempsey, Cllr. Perland, 187 Dempsey, Eileen, 187 Dennehy, Nina, 188 Dennehy, Olga, 188 Dennehy, Sarah, 189 Denny, Ronnie, 189 dérive, 165–66 Derrida, Jacques, xii, xv, 64 Desmond, Betty, 188 Desmond, Ellen, 189 Desmond, Gemma, 187 Devery, Mary, 187 Devlin, Siobhan, 188 Dewale, Natalie, 188 Dewale, Natasha, 188 Dibbern, Wiebke, 185, 188 Dieu, Joan, 186 digital, 156, 166 Dillon, Gerard, 30–31 Dillon, Kay, 188 Dillon, Willie, 111 Dineen, Hailey, 188 Dineen, Kieran, 108–9 The Dinner Party, 42 disabilities, 141 divorce, 141 Dixon, Ann, 188 Dlier, Marc, 187 Doherty, Elizabeth, 186 Doherty, Mary, 187 Donaldson, Ann, 185, 188 Donnell, Polly, 190 Donnellan, Jill, 190 Donnelly, Chris, 189 Donnelly, Zoe, 189 Donovan, Nora, 189 Doonan, Hilary, 186 Dore, Ashaki, 187

Dorney, Olga, 188 Dotson, Guy, 187 Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 25 Dowling, Catriona, 189 Dowling, Cliona, 189 Downey, Ian, 189 Dowse, Frances, 186 Dowse, Margaret, 186 Doyce, Ronan, 188 Doyle, Bridget, 186 Dranchak, Jolanda, 117, 119 The Dreamer (Gerard Dillon), 30 Driscoll, Alex, 188 Driscoll, Tilly, 188 Driscoll, Valerie, 188 Drucker, Johanna, 154 Druid Theatre, 122 Duane, Martha, 185–86 Dublin, 141, 146 Duff, Anne, 186 Duffy, Rita, 42 Duggan, Jane, 148, 185 Duggan, Margaret, 189 Dulahery, Alla, 186 Dulahery, Emily, 186 Dunlea, Chris, 185–86 Dunlea, Christine, 186 Dunne, Fergus, 189 Dunne, Fiona, 187 Duss, Jen, 187 Dwyer, Bernie, 187 Dwyer, Bridget, 186 Dwyer, Ned, 189 E E., Mary (knitter), 190 early Christians, 135 Earth Art, 101, 102 Ebb (Dorothy Cross), 25 Edinburgh, UK, 79, 94 Edwards, Iris, 186 Egan, Bridget, 189 Egan, Eileen, 187 Egar, Helen, 188 Eivers, Emily, 189 Ejcarnot, Narlene, 188 Elboore, Kitty, 187 Ellick, Mairead, 187 Ellick, Mousy, 187 Ellick, Saidhbhe, 187 Elward, Dolores, 189 embodiment, 103–6, 145, 182, 183 embroidery, 144, 148, 159 Emmet, Monica, 190 encoding, 61 English, Eoin, xii Ennekens, Julienne, 190 entertainment, 146, 158 Environment Without Objects (EWO), 77, 84, 86, 92

erasure, 63, 101–2, 109–12, 119, 159 Esparza, Adrian, 55 Esselström, L., 77 ethnography, 145 European Capital of Culture, x, xi, 29, 33, 35, 39, 60, 66, 108–9, 111, 135, 149 Cork 2005, xi, 2, 4, 18, 172 European Commission, 29 European Cultural Foundation, 192 European Translation, x Evening Echo, 35, 38 exclusivity, 161 F Fahy, Mary, 190 failure, xi, 34, 40, 47, 64, 67 Fairholm, Janice, 189 Falvey, Nancy, 188 famine roads, 101 Farnan, Caroline, 189 Farr, Eithne A., 185 Farry, Teresa, 187 fashion, 138, 147–48, 160 Feegan, Audrey, 189 Feehey, Jacqueline, 189 Feeney, Catherine, 187 female body, 165 female sexuality, 24, 30 feminine craft, 167 excess, 42, 165, 182 labour, 59, 103, 111 monstrous, xiii, 157, 165, 183 performance, 63 femininity, 55, 167, 183 feminisation, 111 feminism, 51, 55 art, 43 collectives, 161 critique, 41 geography, 63 Irish, 24 materialist, 97 theory, 97 Fenton, Carmel, 189 Fernandez, Picdad, 188 Ferry, Mary, 190 Feslia, Carmel, 189 fiction, 65 File, Sarah, 188 Finn, Justine, 187 Finnerty, Evelyn, 188 Finland, 77 Fitzgerald, Anne, 189 Fitzgerald, Hannah, 186 Fitzgerald, John, vii Fitzgerald, Liam, 188 Fitzgerald, Phil, 188 Fitzpatrick, Elizabeth, 188

Index   211

Fitzpatrick, Helen, 188 Fitzpatrick, Johanne, 186 Fitzsimons, Maureen, 186 Flaherty, Robert, 29 Flannery, Nicole, 187 Fleming, Bernadette, 186 Fleming, Joan, 188 Fleming, Sheila, 186 fluidity, 158, 167–68 Flynn, Betty, vii, 150, 185, 18 Flynn, Kayleigh, 188 Foley, Catherine, 105 Foley, Fergal, 187 Foley, James, 187 Foley, Jayne, 188 Foley, Mercy, 147, 185–86 Foley, Niamh, 188 Foley, Susan, 190 folklore, 145 Foost, Tessa, 189 Forde, Jennifer, 187 Forde, Julia, 185–86 Forde, Katrim, 186 Forde, Katrina, 185, 187 Forde, Kim, 189 Forde, Rose, 189 Forsiner, Gerda, 190 Forrest, Orla, 186 Forrester, Jeanne, 189 Foster, Sarah, xiv, 37, 47, 151–55, 161 Fota Gardens, Co. Cork, vi Fota House, Co. Cork, 33 Foulds, Brenda, 188 Founding President’s Award, Textile Society of America, viii Foy-Twomey, Marie, 185–86 Foynes, Peter, 10 Frankenstein (Shelley, 1818), xiv Frawley, Nora, 185 Friel, Brian, 192 Froggatt, Laura, 189 Fuller, May, 188 funding, xi, 40–41, 45–47, 109, 111, 119, 160, 163, 194 public, 111 Futurism, 26 G Gaget, Elodie, 187 Galway, IE, 29 Gamez, Cecilia, 185, 190 Ganser Gallery, vii, viii, 109, 113–14, 116, 191 Garry Brosnan, Elizabeth, 185–86 Geaney, Anita, 185–86 Geaney, Ciara, 186 Gearey, Anita, 186 Geary, Deirdre A., 188 Geary, Emma, 186

Geary, Teresa, 146, 185, 187 Geerey, Anita, 187 Gelitin, 55 Gell, Sally-Ann, 188 gender, 57, 112, 120, 163 geographies, 59, 64, 99, 167 Germanabou, Vicky, 190 ghosts, 62, 73, 98, 166–67, 182 Gibbons, Nora, 185 Gibson, Marie, 190 Gilbert, Janice, 190 Gillis, Eileen, 186 Gilson, Natalie, viii, ix Gilson(-Ellis), Jools, ix, x–xi, xv–xvi, 1–17, 35, 37–38, 44–47, 79, 113–14, 118, 135, 142, 150, 166, 170, 185, 188, 191, 194 Glavin, Catherine, 187 The Glucksman, vii–viii, xi, 18–19, 35, 46–48, 58, 61, 98, 105, 109, 183 The Knitting Map: Art, Community and Controversy 2005–2015, 19, 35, 37, 42, 45–48, 61, 109 A Stitch in Time: The Fabric of Contemporary Life, 19, 48 Gnas, Sashina, 188 Goggin, Mary, 185, 186 Golden, Don, 187 Golden Hands, 165 Gomme, Rachel, 53 Goodall, Siobhan, 189 Goodman, Lizbeth, 189, 192 Gould, Eva, 189 Graham, Bernadette, 189 Grainger-Chezman, Daphne, 186 Grattan, Sheila, 188 Gray, Joan, 189 Grealy, Cliona, 188 Greaney, Evelyn, 186 The Great Famine, 101 Greene, Mary, 185, 188 Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, 55–56 Greer, Germaine, 43, 55–56 Gresson, Keith, 187 grief, 59, 184 Griffin, Kathleen, 187 Griffin, Julianne, 185–86 Groarke, Jayne, 189 Groombridge, Alan, 84–85 Gschwandtner, Sabrina, 80, 94, 152 Guatemala, viii, ix Guattari, Felix, 21 Guibert, Janice, 190 Guibert, Maurice, 190 Guilfayle, Jean, 190 Guinan, Rita, 185, 187 Guinness Book of World Records, 41, 111 Gunn, April, 189

H H-Block rope drawing (Patrick Ireland) 24 Hackett, Kellie, 189 Halder, Jason, 187 Hales, Joan, 189 half/angel, x–xi, xv, 2, 4, 10, 15, 33, 37–38, 40, 103, 105, 108, 113, 116, 119, 164, 191 Hallahan, Teresa, 187 Hamilton, Ann, 23, 50 Hammond, Harmony, 50 hands, 59–63, 66–69, 71, 74, 76, 96, 99, 103, 105, 110, 116, 137, 168, 182 Hannigan, Ana, 189 Hannigan, Mick, 16, 35, 40, 44, 47, 111, 193 Hanschite, Dieten, 187 Happenings, 25 Haraway, Donna, 103, 105 Hardesty, Pamela, 20, 25 Harnett, Breda, 189 Harrington, Clair, 188 Harrington, Joan, 188 Harrington, John, 187 Harrington, Karen, 190 Harrington, Mary, 188 Harrington, Olivia, 189 Harris, Audrey, 188 Harris, Helen, 188 Hart, Aileen, 189 Hart, Betty, 189 Hart, Trish, 189 Harte, Ina, 189 harvest, 163 Hassett, Sue, 188 Hastings, Bertha, 186 Haughey, Charles J., 193 Haughey, Seana, 189 Hayes, Jessica, 185–86 Hayes, Mary, 188 Healy, Breda, 186 Healy, Marian, 189 Heaney, Helen, 190 Heaphy, Caroline, 185–86 Heaphy, Nicole, 186 Heedes, Helen, 187 Heffernan, Martina, 185–86 Hegarty, Anne, 186 Hegarty, Catherine, 186 Hegarty, Emma, 186 Hegarty, Jennifer, 185, 188 Helen, Irene, 188 Helly, Josephine, 190 Hemmings, Jessica, x, xiii, xv, 77–94 Hemmingway, Margaret, 186 Hennessy, Jess, 186 Hennessy, Kathleen, 189 Hennessy, Lisa, 187 Hennessy, Maeve, 185, 187 Index   212

Hennessy, Theresa, 189 Henrick, Eileen, 150, 185, 186 Henry, Grace, 27 Henry, Paul, 27–28 heritage, 134–35, 140, 145–46 Heritean, Emilie, 187 Hernando, Ana María, 80, 92, 94 Hessy, Alya, 80, 91–92, 94 Hickey, Rosemary L., 189 Higgins, Lisa, 189 Hilly, Pat, 187 Hinterland, 37, 193 historical geography, 136 history, 162 local, 135 oral, 139–40 Hoare, Ellen, 188 Hodel, Marianne, 189 Hoelscher, Steven, 99 Hoey, Kathleen, 189 Hogan, Lorraine, 187 Hogan, Nicola, 188 holes, 59, 66–67, 69, 74, 97, 100, 110, 159, 165, 168, 183 Holland, Ann, 185 Holland, Maey, 189 Holmes, Marie, 185–6 Holzer, Sarah, 187 Hopkins, Sr. Kathleen, 148, 185–6 Horan, Peggy, 186 Hosford, June, 185 Hourican, Helen, 187 Hovinga, Lucy, 190 Howard, Matt, 189 Howe, Eileen, 188 Howell, Ena, 187 Howley, Caoimhe, 189 Hughes, Lynda, 185–86 Hull, Molly, 189 Hurley, Aine, 189 Hurley, Breda, 186 Hurley, Holly, 189 Hurley, Joy Sarah, 185, 187 Hussey, Mary, 188 Hussey, Phil, 188 Hyde, Pauline, 186 I identity cultural, 59, 69, 116, 119, 146, 149 gendered individual, 100, 116, 119, 150, 161, 163 national, 68, 70–71, 105 performative, 60, 69 shared, 117 ideology, 161 Ingold, Tim, 21, 77–78, 80, 84, 86, 92–94, 99 Inis t’Orr: Aran Dance (Pauline Cummins), 30 image, 64, 102

inclusivity, 40, 161, 169 IndieCork Film Festival, 35 industrialisation, 160 Inside Cork, xiv, 40–41, 111, 135 Institute for Choreography and Dance, Cork, 191 Interior Scroll (Carolee Schneeman), 55 invisibility, 61, 107, 156, 159, 161 IRA, 55 Ireland, Patrick, 24 Irish Constitution, 42, 44, 145, 148, 194 Irish Countrywomen’s Association, 42 Irish Examiner, 34, 38, 41–42, 45–47, 111 Irish Folklife Museum, 147 Irish Free State, 29–30 Irish Museum of Modern Art, 23 Irish Statesman, 26 Irish Times, 35, 45, 193 Magazine, 35 Weekend Review, 35 Irwin, Katherine, 189 Irwin, Kathy, 189 iterability, 67, 97 J Jablin Schellekens, Maurice, 190 Jackson, Ruth, 185, 187 Jagen, Stephanie, 186 Jameson, Tonya, 56 Jattan, Catherine, 189 Jellet, Mainie, 26 Jenkins, Casey, 55 Jenkins, Falyn, 188 Jergeson, Andrew, 187 Jerreira, Jill, 187 Jillespie, Ruth, 189 Johnson, Andrea, 187 Johnson, Sheyanne A., 186 Jonas, Kelly, 186 Jonathan Lill, Christina, 189 Jones, Carol, 189 Jones, Colleen, 185, 188 Jones, Margaret, 185, 187 Jordan, Kate, 187 Jørgenson, Marianne, 55 journalism, 34, 37 journey, 168 Jung, Rita, 185, 188 Just, Kate, 85–86 K K., Carmel (knitter), 187 Kalin, Kate, 187 Kamanda, Lionel, 185, 187 Kane, Marian, 188 Kaprow, Allan, 25 Kasey, Linda, 189

Kavanagh, Bonnie, 187 Kavanagh, Ros, 122 Keane, Claire, 186 Keane, Elaine, 189 Keane, Roy, 35, 70 Kearney, Caroline, 185–86 Kearney, Eveanne, 189 Kearney, Fiona, vii–viii, 19, 48, 193 Kearney, Maura, 189 Kearney, Megan, 186 Kearney, Rhoda, 187 Keating, Alice, 186 Keenan, Margaret, 185, 188 Kelher, Martina, 187 Kelleher, Christina, 186 Kelleher, Karen, 188 Kelleher, Teresa, 185–86 Kelly, Claire, 185–86 Kelly, Cynthia, 185, 187 Kelly, Gerry, 45 Kelly, Kathryn, 188 Kelly, Siobhán, 190 Kelly Conroy, Elaine, 188 Kelly Moloney, Ailish, 187 Kennedy, Anna, 186 Kennedy, Anne, 186 Kennedy, Bridie, 188 Kennedy, Margaret, vii, 8, 113–14, 150, 185–86, 191 Kennedy, Mary, 186 Keohane, Denis, 189 Keohane, May, 185 Keohane Hickey, Nora, 186 Kerrigan, J., 26 Kerry Babies scandal, 31, 193 Kester, Grant, 25 Kidd, Tracey, 185–86 Kidney, Maeve, 185, 188 Kiely, Ellie, 189 Kiely, Jean, 188 Kiely, Louise, 185 Kiely Quinlan, Sheila, 187 Kilcoyne, David, 188 Kilcoyne, Jennifer, 188 Kilcoyne, Mary, 188 Kilcoyne, Michelle, 188 Killarney, Co. Kerry, Ireland, 149 Kingston, Margaret, 161, 185–86 Kingston, Veronica, 186 Kinsale, Co. Cork, 184 Klinghoffer, Shirley, 53 Kneehigh Theatre, vii knit-in(s), vi, 38, 117, 140–42 KNIT HOPE (Kate Just), 85–86 “Knit Lancaster”, 116 KNIT SAFE (Kate Just), 85–86 Knitting Ballet (Ana María Hernando), 90–91, 94 knitting circles, 158 The Knitting Machine (Dave Cole), 88–90 Index   213

The Knitting Map, vi–viii, ix, xii–xiii, xiv, xvi, 2–7, 9, 11–32, 50, 57, 77–80, 123, 129, 132, 151, 154–70, 172, 176, 182, 184, 191, 194 Knitting Nation (Liz Collins), 53, 94 knitting patterns, x, 38, 40, 158, 162, 167 Knitting Peace (Cirkus Cirkör), 78 Knitting Reference Library, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK, 162, 165, 167–69 Knocknaheeny, Cork, 7 Korsnäs sweaters, 77, 194 Kowalski, Karla, 190 Kozloff, Joyce, 73–74 Kramer, Helle, vii Kretner, Franz, 187 Kurby, Niamh, 187 Kwong, Jessica, 189 L labour artistic, 109, 120 domestic, 44, 158 feminine, 111, 165, 167 voluntary, 41, 108, 110, 167 women’s, 37, 59, 61, 106, 110, 156, 167, 169 LaBuse, Neil, 43 lace Borris, 148 lace-making, 148 Lacey, Dara, 188 Laide, Fionnuala, 185 Lalor, Brian, 188 Lamb, Charles, 27 Lamb, Lucy, 185 Lancaster City, Pennsylvania, USA, 116 Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, USA, xiv, 108–10, 113–14, 117, 120 Lancaster Museum of Art, 118 Lanches, Carmen, 187 landscape, 134, 136, 138, 158, 164, 183 Landscape and Memory, 136, 186 Lanes, Kirsten, 187 language, 64, 67, 99, 157, 159 Lanigan, Carol, 188 Lanigan, Sorcha, 189 Lankford, Maeve, 185 Latmour, Judy, 188 Latmour, Sarah, 188 Lavery, Liam, 188 Lawlor, Alice, 188 Lawn, Ann, 190 Lawrence, Irina, 190 Lawrence, Tejal, 190 Lawton, Mary, 185–86 Layton, Betty, 186 Leader, Darian, 82

Leahy, Marcy, 186 Leahy, Nancy, 185–86 Leane, Maria, 190 Leen, Kathryn, 187 legend, 63–64, 70, 74, 95, 97, 107 Lehr, Nehly, 190 leisure, 156, 158, 160 Leland, Mary, 154 Lenihan, Trish, 189 Lezama, Maria, 188 Libeskind, Daniel, 43 Liegel, Jules, 188 Lima Biennale, 25 The Lios (half/angel), 4 Lippard, Lucy, xiii, 43, 112, 161 Linehan, Ann, 189 Linehan, Jennifer, 185, 188 Linehan, Kay, 190 Lingwood, Holly, 187 Lingwood, Ka, 187 The Lios (half/angel), 4, 10 Listin, Gay, 189 literality, 59 Little, Mary, 186 Lombard, Eileen, 185–86 London, UK, 136 Long, Betty, 187 Long, Declan, 23 Long, Úna, 185 Long Kesh prison, 24 Longwell, Maree, 190 Looney, Aoife, 189 Looney, Eadaoin, 185, 187 Looney, Eavan, 185, 187 Lord Mayor of Cork, 145 loss, 99, 100, 108, 112, 119, 183, 184 Lovett, Ann, 31, 193 Lucas, Jacinta, 185 Lucas, Jane, 186 Lucey, Joan, 188 Lucey, Julia, 187 Lucey, Julie, 185–86 Lucey, Kaitlin, 185, 187 Lucey, Mona, 187 Lyes, Cindy, 186 Lynch, Catherine, 187 Lynch, Declan, 189 Lynch, Donal, 15, 20, 25, 36, 40, 45, 51, 154 Lynch, Jessica, 189 Lynch, Siobhán, 190 Lynch, Stephen, 187 Lynch O’Kelly, Ciara, 189 Lyons, Kate, 188 M MacCurtain Street, Cork, 142 MacGrath, Angela, 186 Macnas, 124 Madden, Breda, 188

Madden, Grace, 185–86 Madden, Jenny, 189 Maddock, Angela, 82, 189 Maddock, Hugh, 189 Maddock, Ruby, 189 Magill Magazine, 36 Magin, Sadie, 185 Magnin, Jackie, 185 Magnin, Jadie, 187 Magsin, Jackie, 187 Maher, Emily, 188 Maher, Eva, 185 MAKE Symposium, 44 Man of Aran 1934, 29 Manling, Cheryl, 189 Manning, Erin, 103–4 Manning, Nora, 186 Mansfield, Denise, 189 mapping, 156–58 Marsland, Faith, viii Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 88 materialism, 97 materiality, 62, 68, 99, 107, 110, 112, 145 Matindale, Julie, 190 Matthews,, 191 Marianne (knitter), 185 mark, 64 marketplace, 160 Marole, Rosaleen, 187 Marple, Miss, 158 marriage, 141, 146 Martin, Anita, 189 Martin, Deirdre, 186 Martin, Sarah, 189 Martyn, Lily, 188 Mary (knitter), 187 Marygold, Muireann, 185, 187 Maschlar, Marina, 187 masculinity, 159, 161 mathematics, 162, 182 Maze prison, 24 Mazza, Cat, 56 McAdoo, Patrice, 187 McAdoo, Susan, 187 McAleese, Mary, 43 McAleese, Daniel, 70 McAllister, Joan, 188 McAllister, Kathleen, 190 McArtain, Roisin, 186 McCabe, Freda, 186 McCaffrey, Kieran, 187 McCallum, Shara, ix McCarthy, A., 186 McCarthy, Angela, 185, 189 McCarthy, Betty, 187 McCarthy, Donagh, 187 McCarthy, Emma, 185–86 McCarthy, Frances, 185, 187 McCarthy, Jeanienne, 185 Index   214

McCarthy, Kieran, vii, xi, xv, 15, 50, 151 163, 164, 186 McCarthy, Linda, 185, 188 McCarthy, Mary, vii, 188 McCarthy, Niamh, 188 McCarthy, Sheila, 188 McCarthy, Thomas (Tom), vii, 15–16, 47, 182 McCoo, Elaine, 189 McCormack, Ann, 189 McCormack, Tracy, vii McCormick, Robert, 185, 188 McCoy, Margaret, 189 McDermott, Kate, 188 McDermott, Niamh, 189 McDonagh, Eadaoin, 186 McDonagh, Sonnie, 187 McDonald, Sr. Josephine, 186 McElroy, Helen, 188 McEniry, Yvonne, 186 McEvoy, Ciara, 189 McEvoy, Meadhbh, 187 McFadden, David Revere, 110 McGann, Nessa, 187 McGillion, Liam, 187 McGlynn, Linda, 186 McGovern, Finola, 186 McGrath, Angela, 186 McGrath, Jo, 190 McGrath, Maureen, 162, 186 McGrath, Sheila, 186 McGregor, Christine, 185 McGuire, Rose, 135, 185, 189 McKean, Orla, 188 McKenna, Bernadette, 189 McLean, Marie, 190 McLeish McCarthy, Ethel, 187 McLoughlin, Gerry, 38 McMahon, Aoife, 189 McManus, JT, 190 McNamara, Patricia, 188 McNamara, Susan, 185–86 McNamee, Joe, 155 McSuise, Ane, 185–86 McSuise, Pre, 185 McSwiney, Claire, 187 McSwiney, Margaret, 187 Meaney, Liz, vii meaning, 183 media, 33–48, 69, 108, 111, 119, 156, 161, 163, 165 controversy, 34, 36 deadlines, 34, 37, 47 drama, 34 Meinolf, Travis, 78 memory, 60, 113, 117, 134–35, 137, 139, 145, 150, 157–58, 163–64, 169, 184 collective, 140 cultural production, 145 Mending Project (Lee Mingwei), 79

Met Éireann, 156 The Met Office (UK), 156 Mewis, Susan, 186 Michelsson, Anne, 190 Millenium Hall, 4, 18, 32, 109, 114, 149 Miller, Dutes, 83–84 Millersville University of Pennsylvania, vii, 109, 113–14, 192 Millstreet Country Park, Co. Cork, 149 Mina Mina, 104 Mingwei, Lee, 78 Mitchen, Jill, 189 mneme (Ann Hamilton), 23 Möbius Strip, 118–19 Moffat, Graham, 75 Moffat, Nicola, viii, ix, xii, 161 Moffat, Russell, ix Mohamod, Hilini, 187 Moley, Robert, 189 Moloney, Anna, 189 Moloney, Donal, 186 Moloney, Emily, 187 Monk, Anna, ix monsters, xii–xiii, 41, 62, 183 monstrosity, xiii, xv–xvi, 14, 109, 111, 163, 165 Moon, Ag, 187 Moon, Agnes, 187 Moone, James, 185, 187 Moone, Michael, 185, 187 Moone, Rosemary, 185, 187 Mooney, Ann, 189 Moore, Alex, 189 Moore, Kitty, 186 Moore, Susan, 190 morgue, 99, 109 Morgin, Meg Tracy, 188 morphological change, 136 Morrissey, Anne, 189 Morrissey, Ita, 189 Morrison, J’aime, 105 Mother Ireland, 42 Motherway, Niamh, 188 mourning, 59 mouthplace (half/angel), 15 Moynihan, Sarah, 185, 188 Mulcahy, Mary, 188 Mulinhill, Anna, 188 Mullaly, Kay, 185–86 Mullins, Ellen, 185–86 Mullins, Loretta, 185 Mullins McGillion, Loretta, 187 Mulloy, Frances, 188 Mulqueen, Bindie, 187 multiplicity, 60, 105 Munster Literature Centre, x Munza, Manlon, 185 Munza, Marilyn, 186

Murphy, Ansuya, 188 Murphy, Aoife, 188 Murphy, Audrey, 189 Murphy, Breda, 185–86 Murphy, Brid, 187 Murphy, Caron, 187 Murphy, Chrissie, 185–86 Murphy, Ciana, 187 Murphy, Ciara, 185–86 Murphy, Jennifer, 186 Murphy, Jenny, 190 Murphy, Kay, 187 Murphy, Leah, 189 Murphy, Louise, 185–86 Murphy, Mai, 185–86 Murphy, Mary, 186 Murphy, May, 185–86 Murphy, Mel, vii, 146, 150, 185–86 Murphy, Nora, 185, 187 Murphy, Rita, 187 Murphy Attridge, Nancy, 188 Murphy Dooley, Alana, 189 Murphy Dooley, Shauna, 189 Murray, Margaret, 188 Murray, Marilyn, 186 Murray, Paula, 187 music, 162 Myler, Rebecca, 189 Myohy, Kieran Anthony, 188 myth, 157 Mythen, Katie, xiv, 14, 40–41, 111, 152, 154 N Nagle, Chloe, 189 Nagle, Noelle, 185–86 Nagle, Sabina, 187 Nagaoka, Mie, 188 Naida, 55 Napangardi, Dorothy, 104 narrative, 34, 47–48, 59, 112, 141–42, 145, 157–59, 163, 168 Naseeer, Mohammad, 190 Nash,, Catherine, 31 National Museum of Ireland, 147 National Sculpture Factory, Cork, vii, x National University of Ireland, viii navigation, 65, 67, 166 Neale, Charlotte, 186 Neilamd, Eve, 187 Neville, Aaron, 187 Neville, Emma, 187 Neville, Roisin, 188 New Testament, 144 Newport, Mark, 55 Ní Bhaoill, Fiodhna, 189 Ní Bheollann, Justine, 185, 187 Ní Dhomhnaill, Onóra, 189 Ní Mhaolain, Trease, 187 Ní Seanachán, Eibhlín, 190

Index   215

Nitifiskinji, Judith, 185–86 Njonguo, Anna, 185 Nkomo, Nokuthula, 185 Nolan, Adrienne, 187 Nolan, Brian, 187 Nolan, Eimear, 189 Nolan, Irene, 187 Nolt, Mary, 185 Nonsuch Ireland, 140 Noonan, Breda, 189 Noonan, Bridie, 189 Noonan, Kathleen, 186 Noonan, Margaret, 189 Norries Motor Cycle Club, 132 Norris, Mary, vii, 150, 185–86 Northern Ireland, 24 nostalgia, 163 Nott, Mary, 187 Nyorgro, Anna, 187 O Ó Bhéal, Cork, ix objects, 157 O’Briain, Myffina, 188 O’Brien, Bernie, 185–86 O’Brien, Betty, 189 O’Brien, Claire, 188 O’Brien, Darren, 185, 188 O’Brien, Edna, 42 O’Brien, Ellen, 189 O’Brien, Joyce, 186 O’Brien, Kate, vi, vii, 35, 141–42, 150, 162, 188 O’Brien, Kathryn, 186 O’Brien, Kathy, 185, 187 O’Brien, Marie-Ann, 188 O’Brien, Martha, 188 O’Brien, Maureen, 189 O’Brien, Pauline, 186 O’Brien, Sharon, 189 O’Brien, Valerie, 185, 187 O’Callaghan, Jennifer, 185, 187 O’Callaghan, Joan, 188 O’Callaghan, Maura, 135 O’Callaghan, Paula, 185–86 O Ceallachoin, Colm, 186 O’Ceallaghan, Carissa, 187 O’Ceallaghan, Marian, 188 O Cinneide, Margaret, 188 O’Connell, Claire, 189 O’Connell, Daimsie, 186 O’Connell, Elsie, vii, 148, 185 O’Connell, Florrie, 186 O’Connell, James, 189 O’Connell, Kellie, 188 O’Connell, Laura, 187 O’Connell, Mary, 190 O’Connell, Maura, 26, 135, 185–86 O’Connell, Sonny, 190 O’Connor, Agnes, 188

O’Connor, Aileena, 188 O’Connor, Aisling, 186 O’Connor, Alannah, 188 O’Connor, Brigid, 187 O’Connor, Eileen, 185–86 O’Connor, Karen, 187 O’Connor, Olivia, 187 O’Connor, Vera, 189 O’Cown, Rosaleen, 189 O’Dea, Elizabeth, vii, 150, 185–86 O’Dea, Una, 188 Odlums Flour, 146 O Doibhlin, Crónán, vii O’Donnell, Aoife, 187 O’Donnell, Francis, 186 O’Donnell, Lynda, 187 O’Donnell, Rachel, 189 O’Donoghue, Betty, 187 O’Donoghue, Bridie, 187 O’Donoghue, Donna, 186 O’Donovan, Cáit, 189 O’Donovan, Georgina, 185, 187 O’Donovan, Gretta, 189 O’Donovan, Kay, 188 O’Donovan, Mary, 189 O’Donovan, May, 185 O’Donovan, Nuala, 135, 185, 189 O’Donovan, Peg, 188 O’Driscoll, Catherine, 187 O’Driscoll, Kay, 187 O’Driscoll, Mary, 187 O’Driscoll, Ninita, 186 O’Driscoll, Rena, 185, 187 O’Driscoll, Sylvia, 186 O’Driscoll, Virginia, 189 Ó Duinnín, Cáit, 189 Ó Duinnín, Claire, 189 O’Flynn, Mairín, 188 O’Flynn, Nóirín, 186 O’Flynn, Noreen, 186 O’Gorman, Róisín, viii, ix, xiv, xv–xvi, 158 O’Halloran, Claire, 189 O’Keeffe, Bernadette, 185 O’Keeffe, Donna, 188 O’Keeffe, Heather, 188 O’Keeffe, Noreen, 188 O’Keeffe, Tara, 188 Old Testament, 144 O’Leary, Aisling, 190 O’Leary, Anna, 135, 185 O’Leary, Brid, 187 O’Leary, Eileen, 190 O’Leary, Irene, 185 O’Leary, Liam, 189 O’Leary, Maureen, 135, 185 O’Leary, Michael, 187 O’Looney, Pat, 188 O’Mahoney, Kitty, 186 O’Mahoney, Mary, 185–86

O’Mahony, Ann, 190 O’Mahony, Claire, 185–86 O’Mahony, Eadin, 189 O’Mahony, Rachel, 185–86 O’Mahony, Shannon, 189 O’Mahony’s Avenue, Cork, 182 O’Malley, Anne, 188 O’Mull, Breda, 187 O’Mullane, Patsy, 187 On Photography (Susan Sontag), 122 O’Neill, Margaret, 188 O’Neill, Maureen, 188 O’Neill, Meabh, 188 O’Neill, Oisin, 190 O’Neill, Sally, 185 O’Neill, Sheila, 186 O’Raghailligh, Aine, 187 O’Regan, Amy, 188 O’Regan, Breda, 186 O’Regan, David, 187 O’Regan, Maney, 188 O’Regan, Nancy, 185 O’Regan, Rekina, 188 O’Regan, Rita, 186 O’Regan, Sarah, 187 O’Regan, Selina, 188 O’Regan, Theresa, 187 O’Regan, Therese, 186 O’Regan, Vivienne, 187 O’Reilly, Catherine, 190 O’Reilly, Emer, 185–86 O’Riordan, Alan, 192 O’Riordan, Ann Marie, 185–86 O’Riordan, Bernadette, 188 O’Riordan, Dan, 188 O’Riordan, Kay, 187 Ormerod, Emma, 187 O’Rourke, Breda, 185 O’Rourke, Geraldine, 190 O’Rourke, Margaret, 185, 189 O’Rourke, Maureen, vii O’Rourke, Rosaleen, 190 O’Rourke, Sinead, 188 Orpheus Gallery, Belfast, 24 Orr, Melanie, 187 O’Shea, Katie, 189 O’Shea, Liz, 189 O’Shea, Marie, 190 O’Shea, Nuala, 187 O’Shea, Rachel, 186 O’Sullivan, Ann, 189 O’Sullivan, Annelle, 187 O’Sullivan, Carmel, 187 O’Sullivan, Dale, 186 O’Sullivan, Denise, 189 O’Sullivan, Eileen, 186 O’Sullivan, Emer, 190 O’Sullivan, Frances, 190 O’Sullivan, Julian, 188 O’Sullivan, Kitty, 185, 187

Index   216

O’Sullivan, Margaret, 185–86 O’Sullivan, Maria, 185 O’Sullivan, Marian, vii, 142, 150, 186 O’Sullivan, Marie, 186 O’Sullivan, Marie Claire, 189 O’Sullivan, Maureen, 185 O’Sullivan, Moira, 186 O’Sullivan, Nikita, 187 O’Sullivan, Sarah, 189 O’Sullivan, Siobhan, 185 O’Sullivan, Sonia, 35–36 O’Sullivan, Tanya, 185 O’Toole, Colin, 187 O’Toole, Ger, 187 O’Toole, Jules, 187 O’Toole, Mary, 187 Over and Under (Alya Hessy), 91–92 ownership, 146 P Pain, Jean, 186 painting, 104, 112 Palmer, Kate, 187 Palmer, Robert, 192 Paper Visual Art Journal, 34 Parker, Margaret, 187 Pardy, Julie, 185–86 Parr Burman, Kay, 188 patriarchy, 161 Patterson, Jean, 189 Patterson, Patricia, 50 Peace Knits (Marianne Jørgenson), 55 Peers, Juliette, 86 Pelzel, Nagen, 187 Pennsylvania, USA, vii–viii, 34, 51, 113 People’s Republic of Cork (chat room), 36 Peppand, Anny, 188 perception, 156 performance, 97, 98, 100, 105, 107, 112–13, 117, 142, 169, 182, 184 Performance Research, viii, 191 performativity, xii, 23 affective, 61, 65 arts practice, 97, 103, 116 constitutional, 59, 104, 165 identity practice, 60, 69, 105–6 gender, 165 making meaning, 168, 182 social practice, 59 speech, 65, 99 Perkins, Angela, 186 Perry, Grayson, 20 Perryman, Grace, 188 Peru, 25, 90 Phelan, Florina, 188 Phelan, Peggy, xiv, 100, 102, 123 philanthropy, 160 Philbrick, Kristin, 185, 189 photography, 112 Pierce, Lily, 186

Pittorinio, Brendan, 189 Pittorinio, Faye, 189 Pittorinio, Maria, 189 place, 116, 119–20, 135, 137, 140, 156–57, 191 pleasure, 165 poetry, xi, 38, 59, 69, 102, 158–59, 166 politicians, 164 Poole, Helena, 190 Pope’s Quay, Cork, 135, 140 Poschner, Monika, 190 Povall, Richard, vii, ix–xi, xiv, xv–xvi, 10–11, 13, 15, 37, 135, 150, 184–85, 187 poverty, 145–46, 149, 167 Powell, Brymm, 188 Powell, Lionel, 164, 187 Powell, Pat, 188 power, 59, 64, 161, 167, 183 Power, Clara, 189 Power, Eleanor, 188 Power, Imelda, 187 Power, Lauryn, 188 presence, 61, 67–68, 73, 100, 183 President of Ireland, 9, 182 President’s Fund, University College Cork, viii Price, Kelly, 187 Pricked: Extreme Embroidery, 111 process, 38, 44, 59, 145, 149, 158, 162 generational, 145 promises, 64–66, 68 Prunty, Jacinta, 188 Publications Grant, National University of Ireland, viii Pujade Hennessy, Francoise, 189 Punch, Lydia, 188 Punch, Philip, 188 puns, 34, 157 Purcell, Brigid, 188 Purcell, Julianna, 189 Purcell, Mary, 188 Purcell, Michael, 188 Pussy Riot, 55 Pyke, Ann, 188 Pym, Celia, 80–82 Q Quill, Helen, 185–86 Quill, Mary, 188 quilting, 113 The Quiltmaker’s Gift, viii Quin, Glenn, 188 Quin, Kevin, 188 Quinlan, Eamon, 187 Quinlan, Evelyn, 187 Quinlan, Jo, 186 Quinlan, Sinead, 187 Quinlivan, Stacey, 187 Quinn, Debbie, 185–86

R Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting, 110 Rae, Penny, viii, 192 Rafter, Edith, 186 Raggett, Mary, 185, 186 Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), 35, 42 News, 42 Rákoczi, Basil, 30 Raleigh, Bridie, 187 Ralff, Josephine, 186 Ralph, Ann, 185–86 Rane, Isabelle, 190 Ratcliffe, May, 188 Rawson, David, vii reassembly, 139 recession (2008–2015), 44 Reev, Barbara, 188 refugee crisis, 66, 72–73, 75–76 relational aesthetics, 25 Relationscapes, 103–4 Relief Committees, 101 Relocation, 41 Rennie, Sheila, 187 resistance, 100, 104, 142 revolution, 141–42, 162 Reynolds, Kathryn, 190 Rich, Juliette, 178 Richards, Denise, 189 Rieelewal, Bereniece, 188 Rigney, Herta, 189 Ring, Jemma, 185–86 Ringgold, Faith, 50 Riordan, Avril, 189 Robertson, Ali, vii Robinson, Jeri, vii, 113, 116, 118, 190, 192 Robinson, Kirsty, 56–57 Roche, Helen, 188 Roche, Lucy, 186 Rockenshaulo, Erika, 190 Rocket, Gabrielle, 189 Rockley, Jean, 187 Roederer, Thomas, 25 Rofom, Lisa, 186 Rogers, Anne, viii Romans, 136 Romey, Michel, 188 Roos, Jo, 189 Roos, Sarah, 189 rope drawing (Patrick Ireland), 23–24 Rowe, Grace, 189 Rowe, Holly, 189 Rowe, Lucy, 189 Rowe, Megan, 189 Rowe, Sally, 189 Royal Doultan, 184 Royal Dublin Society (RDS), 141, 148, 167

Index   217

Royal Yachting Association (RYA), 5, 7 International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, 3 Yacht Master, 5, 6 Roycroft, Beth, 186 RTÉ Lyric FM, 36, 46–47 Rudigieu, Silke, 186–87 Ruestes, Fanny, 190 Rulphe, Ann, 189 rural enterprise, 145 Rural Ireland, 145, 148 Russell, George, 26 Ryall, Cecilia, 189 Ryan, Helen, 185, 186 Ryan, Jacky, 188 Ryan, Madeleine, 185–86 Ryan, Rebecca, 188 Ryan, Sylvia, 188 Ryan, Tracy, 188 Ryan, Vera, 41 Ryan-Purcell, John, 187 Ryan-Purcell, Mark, 187 Ryan-Purcell, Mary, 185, 187 Ryan-Purcell, Sarah, 187 S S., Teresa (knitter), 186 St. Anne’s Church, Shandon, Cork, 138 St. Columba’s Church, Tullamore, Co. Offaly, 144 St. Finbarr’s Cathedral, Cork, 139 St. Luke’s Church, Cork, x, xiii, 4, 9, 18, 26, 32, 40, 50, 75, 105, 109, 138, 139, 144, 149, 182 St. John’s Well, Millstreet, Co. Cork, 149 St. Patrick’s Bridge, Cork, 138–9 Salter, Lilian, 189 Samma, Jaanus, 55 Sands, Clare, 187 Sands, Lainey, 185, 187 Sands, Tiamna, 185–86 Santa Fe, USA, 53 Sarah Jane (knitter), 187 satellite, 38, 107 Saunders, Kitty, 189 Sayeg, Magda, 55 Scanlon, Sarah, 186 scapegoat, 161, 163 Schama, Simon, 136 Schatz, Katharina, 190 Schmierbach, Amy, 52 Schneemann, Carolee, 55 School of English, University College Cork, viii Schopf, Christine, 190 science, 162 “The Science of Cartography is Limited” (Eavan Boland), 101

Scully, Helena, 189 Sculpture, 112 Seawright, Joy, 186 Second City Trilogy, 43 The Secret Project (half/angel), 4, 10 semantics, 157, 160, 163 Semmes, Beverly, 23 sentimentality, 157 Seward, Holly, 189 Seward, Kellie, 189 sewing, 144, 146 Sexton, Deirdre, 186 Sexton, Gemma, 187 shame, 161 Shanahan, Louise, 188 Shanahan, Mary, 188 Shanahan, Mercy, 186 Shandon Craft Centre, Cork, 142 Shaw, Angela, 190 Shaw, George Bernard, 33 Sheehan, Chloe, 189 Sheehan, Helen, 186 Sheehan, Helena, 189 Sheehan, Lucia, 189 Sheehan, Manon, 187 Sheehan, Rachel, 186 Sheehan, Tony, vii Sheehy, Aoibhin, 189 Shine, Nellie, 187 Shellabarger, Stan, 83–84 Shelley, Mary, xiv Shorten, Betty, 1889 Shreddies, 160 signs, 64, 67, 70 silence, xi, 159 Simmel, George, 155 Simms, Angret, 136 Sirdar, vii Sister Kathleen’s Wednesday Afternoon Club, 149 Situationists, 165 Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972, 112 Skeates, John, 186 skill, 146, 156, 160, 166–68 Slinow, Veronica, 190 Smartlab Digital Media Institute, 192 Smith, Fifi, 189 Smyth, Helen, 186 Sofarhoundi, Yasmin, 189 somatic research, 171 Somers, Sr. Patricia, 188 Sontag, Susan, 122 South America, 25 Souvenir Shop, 42 spaces, 60, 63, 99–100, 103, 109, 116, 118–19, 136, 144–45, 157, 163, 166, 168, 183

Spaink, Lies, 186 speed knitting, 41 Spillane, Daphne, 187 Spillane, Helen, 188 Spillane, Martin, 188 Spillane, Paula, 188 Spinoza, Baruch, 171 Spinstren (half/angel), 10, 15 sport, 160, 163 stained-glass windows, 138, 144 Stankerd, Phil, 186 Stanley, Myra, 186 Starmore, A., 29 status, 161 STEIM Studios, Amsterdam, NL, 170, 191 Stein, Amelia, 122 Steinem, Gloria, 44 Stevens, Bob, 187 Stevens, Sue, 187 stitch, 46, 74, 107, 109–10, 116, 142, 146, 159 double diamond, 146 figure 8, 146 garter, 74 honeycomb, 146, 164 moss, 116 open honeycomb cable, 191 popcorn, 114 purl, 61, 67, 116 rib, 116 seed, 61 stocking, 61 ‘stitch and bitch’, 158 Stothers, Lesley, vii, 186 Strategic Research Fund, University College Cork, viii subversion, 108, 110–113, 120, 159 Sullivan, Jane, 188 Summerhill North, Cork, 182 Summerhill-Coleman, Laura, 188 Sunbeam Factory, Cork, 133 Sunday Independent, 36, 39 Sunday Tribune, 36–38, 43 supplement, 64 Sweaterman (Mark Newport), 55 Sweeney, Barbara, 188 Sweeney, Bernadette, vii, xvi, 121–33 Sweeney, Lisa, 189 Sweeney, Mary, 189 Szabó, Zsuzsanna, 80, 92–93 T tactility, 99, 103–4, 107 Tanith (knitter), 187 Tate Liverpool, 23 Taylor, Cecilia, 186 Taylor, Dorothy, 188 Taylor, M., 186

Index   218

Teape, Beryl, 189 technique, 146 technology, 4, 38, 45–46, 102, 104–5, 110, 112–13, 120, 134, 144, 160, 166–67 Tector, Glenn, 186 Tector Sands, Sue, vi, vii, 41, 135, 150, 186 Teegan, Margaret, 188 Tension (Vander Kooij & Groombridge), 84–85 tension, 59, 105, 159, 164 territory, 61–62, 101, 158, 166, 168 testimony, 164, 165 text, 98–99, 112, 136 textile art, 113, 134 Textile Society of America, viii textiles, x, 99, 110, 113–14, 134, 150, 158, 183 texture, 97, 99, 104–5, 107, 144 Thames River, 136 theatre, 36 Theatre Omnibus, 124 Theodores, Diana, 105 therapy, 160 Therdruss, Diana, 190 Thomas, Howard, 189 Thomas, Janet, 188 Thompson, Beth, 185, 188 Thompson, Claire, 189 Thompson, George, 185, 188 Thompson, Pari, viii Thompson, Ruth, 185, 188 threads, 74, 97–98, 101, 107, 158, 183 thrift, 158, 167 Tighe, Mary, 187 Till, Karen E., 99 Tobin, Bridie, 188 togetherness, 149, 161 Toledo Lernin, Felix, 188 Tominaga, Mai, 78 Tyner, Tomás, viii, 18, 21 Too True to Be Good, 33 topography, 62, 114, 116, 136–38 topophilia, 135, 140 Toscano, Katie, 189 touch, 62, 68, 73 trace, 58, 62, 97–98, 100, 104, 158 tradition, 104–5, 113, 136, 143–45 traffic, x, 40, 96, 102, 117–19, 137, 166 trains, 142, 163 Transition (Zsuzsanna Szabó), 92–93 trapeze, 2 trauma, 100, 103, 144 colonial, 112 cultural, 156 Trevor, Amy Kate, 186 Trevor, Lynn, 186

tribalism, 143 Triggs, Eilish, 185–86 Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, vii–viii, 15, 184 trivialisation, 161 Tshuma Mkwananzi, Thembelihle, 185, 187 Turnbull, Kitty, 186 Turney, Joanne, xiii–xiv, xv, 35, 43 TV3, 108 Twitter, 193 Twomey, Caroline, 186 Twomey, Denise, 188 Twomey, Marion, 187 Twomey, Rose, 187 U Ui Chaoimh, Maire, 188 Uí Mhurchú, Eibhlín, 190 Ulster, 193 uniforms, 158 University College Cork (UCC), xi, 35, 48, 109 Arts Faculty, vii Boole Library vii–viii School of English, viii Strategic Research Fund, viii University of Colorado, Boulder, USA, 90 University of Nebraska, USA, viii Untitled (Pink Tube) Miller & Shellabarger, 83–84 urban spaces, 136 US Civil War, 158 usefulness, 157, 163 V Vagwerdner, Sabrina, 187 value, 37, 65, 101, 110, 144, 146, 160–63, 167–68 cultural, 161–63 van Damme, Bernie, 189 van Duyker, Linda, ix van Duyker, Marian, ix Van Mienlo, Stien, 188 Van Wolvelaene, Helen, 187 Vander Kooij, Andrea, 84–85 Venhem, Ray, 187 Venice Biennale, 20

‘Venice of the North’, 136 Verliest, Annelies, 188 video, 112 Vikings, 135 vintage, 162, 165, 167 violence, 103 Virgo, Vera, 185 visibility, 47, 99, 161, 169 Vogue Knitting, 147 Voices of Cork: The Knitting Map Speaks, 135–45, 148, 158–59, 162–63 W Wagner, Gottfried, 192 Waldron, Michael, vii Walker, Martha, 186 Wallace, Mary, 186 Walsh, Bridget, 187 Walsh, Claire, 187 Walsh, Doreen, 187 Walsh, Dylan, 188 Walsh, Fiona, 186 Walsh, Geraldine, 189 Walsh, Gillian, viii Walsh, Grace, 187 Walsh, Jaristh, 187 Walsh, Julie, 189 Walsh, Niamh, 188 Walsh, Rachel, 185, 188 Walsh, Rita, 185–86 Walsh, Sr. Anna Patrick, 188 Walsh, Valerie, 185–86 Wangaratta City Art Gallery, AU, 86 Ware, Nancy, 187 Warren, Finbarr, 189 Warren, Sean, 186 Watashiba, Yukari, 188 Watkin, Bree, 187 weather, x, 38, 40, 46, 58–59, 95–96, 99, 103–105, 113, 116–19, 137, 143, 156, 166 weaving, 97, 99, 103, 105, 140, 146, 158–59, 183–84 Webster, Diane, 186 Weekes, Kevin, 187 Weldon’s Knitted and Crochet Toys, 168 Welier, Sabrina, 187

Index   219

West of Ireland, 27, 29–30, 101, 146, 196 Weston, Mary, 187 whales, 183 Whelan, Clare, 185–86 Whelan, Kitty, 188 Whelan, Michelle, vii When Faith Moves Mountains, 25 Where’s Me Culture?, 35, 40 Whitbread, Ciara, 189 The White Quadrangle (half/angel), 123 wholeness, 100, 183 Whyte, Linda, 186 Whyte, Shauna, 186 Wilkes, Cathy, 188 Williams, Melissa, 188 Williamson, Mary, 189 Wilson, Veronika, 188 Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK, 162, 167–69 witchcraft, 159 withness, 101–4 witness, 101–3, 158, 163, 165, 183 women, 169 older, 59, 110, 141, 160–61, 167, 184 working class, x, 59, 167 Women in Farming, 178, 198 Wood, Denis, 161 Wood, Pamela, 189 wool, x, xi WOOL 100% (dir. Mai Tominaga), 78 wool-processing, 145 Woschitz, Jolanda, 189 Wren, Karen, 186 Wright, Ileane, 189 Wrixon, Jack, 188 Wrixon, Rebecca, 188 Wrixon, Sarah, 188 Y yarn bombing, 169 Yeats, Stephanie, 186 Z Zahila, Kety, 189

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jools Gilson Jools Gilson is an artist, scholar and broadcaster. She works across multiple disciplines including choreography, performance, public and installation art, creative writing and radio broadcasting. She directed the dance theatre company half/angel from 1995 to 2006, and since 2010 has made creative radio for RTÉ and the BBC. Her texts, choreography, installation and radio work have been performed, exhibited and broadcast internationally. She taught performance practices at the University of Hull and Dartington College of Arts before moving to Ireland in 1996. She is the first Professor of Creative Practice at University College Cork. Nicola Moffat Nicola Moffat is an independent scholar, poet, and artist who lives and practices in Cork, Ireland. She has published articles with Signs: A Journal of Women and Culture and Society (2017) and Edinburgh University Press’ Somatechnics (2018), among others. Her poetry has featured in Ó Bheál’s Five Word Anthology, Smithereens Press’ Smithereens Literary Magazine, and the acclaimed anthology Autonomy, edited by poet Kathy D’Arcy (New Binary Press, 2018). She is a regular contributor to Ó Bheál, Cork’s longest running open mic night (see http://www.obheal.ie/blog/) and to events organised in support of Fired! Irish Women Poets (see https://awomanpoetspledge.com/).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Rachel Andrews Rachel Andrews is a writer and journalist based in Cork, Ireland. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in n+1, Longreads, the London Review of Books, Brick literary journal, the Dublin Review and The Stinging Fly. In 2017 she was shortlisted for the Notting Hill Essay Prize, and in 2013 she was awarded the Documentary Essay Prize at the Centre for Documentary Studies, Duke University. In 2018 she was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize. She teaches journalism and literature at Griffith College Cork. Fionna Barber Fionna Barber is Reader in Art History at Manchester School of Art. Her research interests include 20th-century and contemporary art/visual culture in Ireland, the gender politics of Irish art and post-conflict trauma and memory in art practice from Northern Ireland. Recent publications include Art in Ireland since 1910 (Reaktion Books: 2013) and essays for the Blackwell Companion to Modern Art (2018) and Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (Martha Langford ed., McGill University Press 2017). She is joint editor with Sara Dybris McQuaid and Heidi Hansson of the collection Ireland and the North (Peter Lang 2019), and her current research projects include the politics of women’s art practice in post-1916 Ireland; temporality in feminist art history; and femininity, materiality and embodiment in contemporary painting. Deborah Barkun Deborah Barkun holds a BFA in Studio Art from Carnegie Mellon and an MA/PhD in History of Art from Bryn Mawr College. Her work has been supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Whiting Foundation and a Coleman Dowell Fellowship for Study on Experimental Works. She recently returned from an appointment as Visiting Scholar in Residence at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Presently, she serves as Associate Professor of Art History, Chair of the Department of

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Art and Art History and the Director of Museum Studies at Ursinus College, outside of Philadelphia. Sarah Foster As Lecturer in the history and theory of design at the Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork, Sarah Foster’s interests include aspects of contemporary design, craft and fine art as well as design history. While at Royal College of Art, Sarah was one of the small group who conceived, set up and edited a successful new journal for writing about objects: Things. She has lectured and published widely on Irish and European material culture and also acts as a peer reviewer for American, Irish and British publishers. Jessica Hemmings Jessica Hemmings writes about textiles. She holds a BFA (Honors) in Textile Design from the Rhode Island School of Design (1999), an MA (Distinction) in Comparative Literature from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (2000) and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (2006). She is editor of In the Loop: Knitting Now (Black Dog 2010), The Textile Reader (Bloomsbury 2012) and Cultural Threads (Bloomsbury 2015) and author of Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth (kalliope 2008) and Warp & Weft (Bloomsbury 2012). She is currently Professor of Crafts & Vice-Prefekt of Research at the Academy of Design & Crafts (HDK), University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Lucy Lippard Lucy R. Lippard is a writer, activist, sometime curator and author of twenty-four books on contemporary art and cultural criticism, including The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (1997), Down Country: The Tano of the Galisteo Basin, 1250–1782 (2010) and most recently Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West (2014). She has received nine honorary degrees in fine arts and lives off the grid in rural Galisteo, New Mexico, where she is involved in local politics and community planning; for twenty-one years she has edited the monthly community newsletter, El Puente de Galisteo. Kieran McCarthy For nearly twenty-five years, Kieran McCarthy has actively promoted Cork’s history and heritage. He leads local history talks, City and County school heritage programmes and historical walking tours of Cork and writes a weekly local history column in the Cork Independent as well as books and pursues work through his heritage consultancy business (www.corkheritage.ie). His PhD in Geography, undertaken within the Department of Geography, National University of Ireland Cork, focuses on ideas of collective memory, commemoration, identity and landscape. He was elected to Cork City Council in June 2009 and May 2014 as an Independent (Local Government) City Councillor for the southeast ward of Cork City (www.kieranmccarthy.ie).

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Thomas McCarthy Thomas McCarthy was educated at University College Cork. He has published many collections of poetry, including The First Convention, The Sorrow Garden, Merchant Prince, The Last Geraldine Officer and Pandemonium. He has also published two novels, Without Power and Asya and Christine, as well as two works of nonfiction, Gardens of Remembrance and Out of the Ashes. He is a member of Aosdána, the Irish Assembly of artists. He has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award and the Alice Hunt Bartlett and O’Shaughnessy Prize for Poetry as well as the Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award. He was Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and The Cork Review. Róisín O’Gorman My work articulates the joint space between traditional scholarship and arts practice. I take creative methodologies from theatre-making and theoretical frameworks of performance studies and pay attention to that which is overlooked or relegated to the margins of experience and knowledge and consider how those forms are politically implicated. I experiment with different modes so that my work reflects an integration and cross-pollination of these realms; results in arts-based research projects, essays in international journals, book chapters and video essays which push the boundaries of conceptual knowledge; and integrates those concepts through the varied forms of outputs. Richard Povall Richard Povall is a producer, educator and researcher and works widely as a consultant with a variety of arts and cultural organisations. He is the Founding Director of art.earth (artdotearth.org), was until recently co-Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art & the Natural World, and chairs the Trustees of Dance in Devon. Previously, he was a founding Director of rural contemporary arts organisation Aune Head Arts and artistic co-Director of dance-theatre company half/angel. Bernadette Sweeney Bernadette Sweeney is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the School of Theatre & Dance at the University of Montana. She was lecturer at University College Cork’s theatre studies programme and has a PhD in theatre from Trinity College, Dublin. Practice as research and artistic collaboration have been the foundations of her performance research, teaching and directing. Recent productions include Lovesong for Bare Bait Dance, the Montana Repertory Theatre national tour of The Miracle Worker and the film Be Again with Michael Murphy. Publications include Performing the Body in Irish Theatre with Palgrave Macmillan, The Theatre of Tom Mac Intyre: Strays from the Ether, co-edited with Marie Kelly (Carysfort Press) and the upcoming Routledge Companion to Performance Practitioners and Routledge Handbook of Studio Practice with Franc Chamberlain.

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Joanne Turney Dr Jo Turney is Associate Professor in Fashion and Design at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, where she is also the director of PhD research. She is the author of The Culture of Knitting (Bloomsbury 2009) and the contributing editor of Fashion Crimes: Dressing for Deviance (I.B Tauris 2018) and the forthcoming In Private: Domestic Interior Design in the UK and USA in the 1970s (Bloomsbury). Her main interests address the intersection where the ordinary meets the extraordinary from the 1970s to date. She has written widely about knitting and contemporary amateur craft, masculinity and dress, and domestic design and is the co-editor (with Alex Franklin) of the journal Clothing Cultures.

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