During this past year, much of my work has been made through Throwing Spaghetti, which is a collective that I co-founded at the start of semester one, it’s focus is on giving me and my peers an opportunity to sell work at fairs and festivals without having to apply separately. This year’s theme was ‘Weird Wild West’. The work that came out of this consisted of zines, stickers and risograph prints which can be seen below.
Initially, I wanted to learn to use knitting machines to create this project, but after learning about the process, I realised that the automation of it didn't fit within my values as a hand maker. Using the knitting machines as a fix for my inability to knit was not the right way to approach this process. Instead, to honour the process and material properly I went back to the drawing board and decided to learn from scratch. I found that the only process unable to be replicated by machine is crochet. Every crochet piece that has been made has been made by human hands. This appealed to me as a craftsperson, so I learned how to crochet for this project. I was inspired to make this piece by the story of Lucille Mulhall, a woman who had the term cowgirl coined after her. She tried something difficult and stuck with it, breaking boundaries for herself, and so I made this jumper to challenge my existing skills.
My work can sometimes take a more romantic approach, using influences from poets such as John Keats. This project sprouted from a desire to create a narrative that weaves pre-existing poetry within it. The final zine is 16 pages and each page is a three colour risograph print created with Out of the Blueprint. The main character, an unnamed girl is struck down by jealousy and transformed by the sublime beauty of the forest, free to fly, unhindered by yearning.
My concept for this print began as I was researching William Blake’s dream based paintings, the images stood out to me as ethereal and flowing. I decided to create some risograph work based upon the idea of dreaming. I like using morphed and contorted shapes to represent dreaming. Much of Blake’s work is also about contrasting forces, playing with good and evil, innocent and experienced. I used these to create the garland below which depicts the struggle between innocence and experience as you transition from an adolescent to an adult.
