Kids are great - they always provide you with a lot of new information and contacts. So thanks to my daughters I know another woman with very special knitting ideas. (This time we have kids in the same music school.)

May I introduce: Marianne Joergensen, a gifted Danish artist who often uses her surroundings as a starting point for her art. In her work she connects events from the public or political stage with her individual and private life using techniques as sewing, knitting, gardening etc.

Last year she organized a major knitting project. Volunteers from many European countries and USA contributed nearly 4000 pink knitted and crochet squares. Outside Nikolaj, Contemporary Art Centre in Copenhagen, a small group of people sewed it all together and covered a tank with this piece of pink patchwork – as a critical statement on Denmark taking part in the Iraq war.

Knitting and crochet is as far away from war thinking as one can possibly imagine. These traditional female crafts signals quite other values such as home, care, proximity and time for reflection… whereas political involvement seems to be a quite overwhelming affair: where to start and where to end? However, most people can knit or crochet a square of 15×15 centimetres - and so a lot of people managed to state their opinion on war - by crafting!

Finally, the process of stitching the squares together over the top of the WW1 tank was documented with a video that was later shown at the exhibition TIME at Nicolaj.
Next Tuesday 10.th April at 20-22 it will be shown at Aarhus-filmvaerksted together with other videos documenting Marianne´s works. Afterwards there’ll be a discussion - where you can meet Marianne in person - if you should happen to drop by…

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 7:31 am and is filed under exhibitions+design+extreme, knitting+crochet+yarn. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.