crochet

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Craft Food

Crocheted Toasts, Ramen, and Turkey Dinners Are Prepared with Rich Fibers by Maria Skog

Maria Skog guarantees her orange slices, turkey, and eggs won’t spoil. She crochets fiber-based creations with preservation in mind, ensuring that every berry and bagel stays as fresh as the day they were made.

Based in  Närpes, Finland, Skog began crafting the fare for her two daughters about 12 years ago when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The practice was meditative and calming. “If I wouldn’t survive, I wanted the girls to have living memories of me, and I thought that they would remember us playing together with the food I crocheted myself,” she says.

Skog sells her toasts and other treats, along with patterns for each piece, which you can find more about on Instagram.

 

Art Craft

Delicate Crocheted Patterns Splice and Embellish Susanna Bauer’s Dried Leaf Sculptures

Vintage lace and the intricate innards of cells influence the thread components of Susanna Bauer’s crocheted works. The German artist, who lives in the U.K., stitches leaves she’s found, washed, and dried, a painstaking process made more laborious by the inherent fragility of the material. “Taking time beneath trees, gathering leaves, contemplating their shapes, imperfections, and details lies at the basis of my process. Along with this quiet gathering, stories form, dialogues between leaves emerge, reflections on time and change and interpersonal connections,” Bauer shares.

Many of the artist’s recent works are on view as part of her solo show Gathering Stories, which translates those conversations and themes into three-dimensional pieces. Similar to her earlier series, this new collection is diverse in species and crocheted patterns. In “Sum of Parts,” various segments from six different trees are spliced with natural cotton thread, while “Blossom” surrounds a single magnolia leaf with fibrous filigree.

Gathering Stories is on view through January 14, 2023, at Le Salon Vert in Carouge, Geneva. You can find more of her work on her site and Instagram.

 

Craft Food

Kitchen Stitching: Pies, Pastries, and Chicken Wings Are Crocheted into Delectable Fiber-Based Cuisine

Healthy fibers meet delicious decadence in Normalynn Ablao’s crocheted provisions. The California-based crafter and pattern maker is cooking up spring rolls, pies, and party-sized platters of chicken wings, crudites, and dip, all made with yarn. Like her pastas, Ablao continues to serve textured designs that mimic their edible counterparts, although she tends to have a taste for cakes, pies, and other baked goods that you can find on Instagram. Whip up your own by grabbing a pattern from Etsy.

 

Art Craft Science

A Vibrant Coral Ecosystem of Thousands of Crocheted Sculptures Confronts the Climate Crisis

A new report released this week by an Australian agency says that the 1,400-mile Great Barrier Reef has undergone its sixth mass bleaching. About 91 percent of the brightly colored marine ecosystems were affected by this most recent catastrophe, which occurs when water temperatures rise. Disasters like this are becoming more frequent as the climate crisis intensifies, prompting artists like Christine and Margaret Wertheim to respond with striking displays of what could be permanently lost.

The Australia-born, California-based sisters began the Crochet Coral Reef project in 2005 to confront the devastations of bleaching, over–fishing, tourism, and agricultural contaminations through sprawling, labor-intensive environments. More than 40,000 of the oceanic works are now on view at the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, transforming the gallery into textured ecosystems resting atop pillars and protected in glass cases. The Wertheims explain the project:

Like the organic beings they emulate, these handmade sculptures take time to make—time that is condensed in the millions of stitches on display; time that is running out for earthly creatures, including humans and cnidarians. Time forms a framework for the Reef project, for as CO2 escalates in our atmosphere time is increasingly in short supply, and what we choose to spend time on is a reflection of our values.

Part of the intention for Crochet Coral Reef is to involve local communities, and so far, almost 20,000 people have contributed their own fiber-based forms, with about 5,000 participating in the show in Baden-Baden alone. Since debuting at the 2019 Venice Biennale, the exhibition has traveled to more than 20 spaces from London and Dublin to Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.,  and will be on view at the Museum Frieder Burda until June 26. A complimentary satellite project is also up at the Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York, through June 12.

Visit the Crochet Coral Reef site for more information on getting involved in the project and for chances to see the textile organisms in person. You also might enjoy Mulyana’s yarn ecosystems. (via artnet)

 

Art Craft

Knit Coral Suits and Vibrant Marine Creatures Spring From Mulyana’s Whimsical Yarn-Based Ecosystems

In Mulyana’s Fragile Ecologies, two figures cloaked in coral and algae tower over beds of fiber-based sea creatures. The Indonesian artist continues his playful and eccentric approach to marine life conservation in his solo show on view through March 4 at Sapar Contemporary, which brings some of his life-sized costumes and an array of woolen specimens to the gallery. Each piece is knit or crocheted with recycled, brightly colored yarn, which the artist fashions into sprawling ecosystems and immersive installations that dangle from the ceiling.

Mulyana puts a fantastic twist on the natural lifeforms, especially when crafting his signature Mogus character: most recently, the reimagined octopus is outfitted with a mustache in leopard print, innumerable eyes all over its body, and polka-dotted horns. Lighthearted in presentation, the works are rooted in more urgent issues like the effects of the climate crisis, isolation, and how we collectively configure identities that are always evolving. A statement about Fragile Ecologies says:

On a macro level, Mulyana’s profound concern for the eroding environment and our collective lack of care for the natural world parallels the importance of self-care on a micro level. His message encourages a holistic path to self-preservation amidst a chaotic and uncertain post-pandemic world. While Mulyana does not overtly reference gender and sexuality in his intricate installations, the diversity of his colorful environments and spectacular costumes allude to the fluidity of human identity.

For more of Mulyana’s underwater knits and costumes, head to his site and Instagram.

 

Art Craft

Social Issues and the Climate Crisis Intertwine in Subversive Crocheted Works by Jo Hamilton

From a mix of wool fibers and yarn made from plastic waste, Scottish artist Jo Hamilton crochets large-scale portraits and architectural landscapes delineated with dangling threads. Her knotted pieces push the boundaries of art and craft traditions, bringing the two together in subversive portrayals of powerful women and metropolises marred by production. Unraveling at the edges, the textured works reflect on interlocking issues like unchecked capitalism, social disparities, and the increasingly urgent climate crisis.

All of the materials Hamilton uses are recycled, whether sourced from estate sales and resalers or created in studio. A few years ago, she started turning grocery bags, videotapes, and other household items into skeins of yarn-like threads—the artist shares some of this process on Instagram—as a way to reduce her impact on the environment, explaining:

We tend to glorify nature as an eternal and everlasting idea, separate from ourselves and our real-life actions. We’ve held on tightly to these ideas during the last few decades in the throes of late capitalism and globalization, and if we don’t change our thinking, policies and behavior immediately it will be too late. So I channeled my anxieties about over-production, pollution, and climate change into my work, using plastic in some of the works in contrast with the yarn.

If you’re in Portland, stop by Russo Lee Gallery to see Hamilton’s most recent works as part of her solo show Transitory Trespass, which closes on November 27.