"Scoop"

Click where?

Burns Place, Gosford on Saturday the 26th of January.

To be seen this week in Burns Place, Gosford, an intervention by three artists who will install a crocheted replacement part in the vandalised memorial fountain designed by Gerald and Margot Lewers. The crocheted “shadow” is to be a substitution for the missing “scoop” shaped copper part of the original sculpture.
This project was initiated and coordinated by Sharyn Walker with the collaboration of Betty Saez and Robyn Wainman.
Sharyn has been leading a campaign to have the long neglected piece of civic art respected and restored, and its designers duly recognised.
The irony of artists crocheting a cosy, woolly, leaky substitution, in these days of water shortages and global warming, to a fountain turned off due to the mismanagement of water supplies, goes somewhat to slaking our thirst for complex content in publicly engaged work.
It is also nice to see public art that is not intended for entertainment, but woven modestly into the fabric of our urban experience.

This subtle mending, with a view to subsequent proper restoration, reminds me of the Mended Spiderweb series by American artist Nina Katchatadourian. Other works can be seen on her web site.

The following is a quote from Katchatadourian’s site. A bit long but worth it for the way it reveals an open ended dialogical working process that yields to natural processes without the work loosing any of its tension and strength.

“In the forest and around the house where I was living, I searched for broken spiderwebs which I repaired using red sewing thread. All of the patches were made by inserting segments one at a time directly into the web. Sometimes the thread was starched, which made it stiffer and easier to work with. The short threads were held in place by the stickiness of the spider web itself; longer threads were reinforced by dipping the tips into white glue. I fixed the holes in the web until it was fully repaired, or until it could no longer bear the weight of the thread. In the process, I often caused further damage when the tweezers got tangled in the web or when my hands brushed up against it by accident.
The morning after the first patch job, I discovered a pile of red threads lying on the ground below the web. At first I assumed the wind had blown them out; on closer inspection it became clear that the spider had repaired the web to perfect condition using its own methods, throwing the threads out in the process. My repairs were always rejected by the spider and discarded, usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned. The larger, more complicated patches where the threads were held together with glue often retained their form after being thrown out, although in a somewhat "wilted" condition without the rest of the web to suspend and stretch them.”

It is to be hoped that the work in Burns Place by Sharyn, Betty and Robyn will similarly result in the repair of the fountain’s original design.

Images from the installation, and background information, will be posted following the installation on Saturday.

It seems that subversive sewing circles and other such seditious activities are slipping social commentary past the surveillance systems (they are watching you Sharyn) in the guise of craft. Susan Hillman’s camouflage sweaters being an example we have covered earlier.

Some more examples can be found in "The history of guerilla knitting", a talk by Rose White at the recent Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.
Also - the exhibition, Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting - Museum of Arts & Design, NYC.




And- David Cole’s “Knitting Machine” project which used two excavators wielding telephone poles as needles to knit a giant American flag in the courtyard of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.