Over the past Many, Many Months, I have been working on a project called Knitted City. It’s part of Adelaide’s COME OUT Festival, a big kid-friendly art extravaganza, and the basic premise was to get a bunch of artists together and yarnbomb Adelaide.
After months of grant applications, council-permission wrangling, and some hardcore Repetitive Strain Injuries, the project has finally been installed. Five artists have yarnbombed three sites across out fair city: a rotunda in Elder park, just by the river Torrens; a courtyard between the university and the Lion Arts Centre; and a stretch of North Terrace, between King William Street and the War Memorial.
If you’re local, GO AND SEE! free public art, knitted wonderment, this week only! Some fairly amazing stuff has been created for this project; externalized organs for a statue of Venus, giant blue poles knitted out of electrical wire, a massive doily ball and a vine-strewn lamppost. I’ll post photos of these later, with the permission of the artists who created them; in the meantime, let me show you what I made…
At the Lion Arts Centre, I bombed a tree with crocheted bands of flowers. it was raining solidly throughout the installation, and by the time everything was sewn on, I was soaked through.
At North Terrace, I cable-tied strings of bell-shaped flowers to lamp-posts. They’re fairly subtle, but quite sweet.
And then, at the Rotunda, I decided (foolishly) to knit sleeves for each of the eight supporting pillars, and cover them with flowers. That’s about eight square meters of knitting and 300 crocheted flowers. It took FOREVER to make and five hours to install. I’m clearly insane, but nonetheless, it’s turned out very pretty indeed:
The yarn for the sleeves was carefully selected to match the green trim on the Rotunda, and each piece was carefully measured and knitted exactly to spec. It’s the most site-specific thing I’ve ever created, and it really deserves a whole process blog to itself (which I will write next month, after the madness has ebbed…)
EDIT – process blog is now written!
Each pillar has a different-coloured set of flowers, ranging from blues through purples to reds and pinks:
I’m more proud of this than anything I’ve done before.
Crafty and Devious 