crocheted from red cotton dress 87 cm long, 50 cm wide arms >350 cm long

The artist: Marjojo from London - media: work made from paper, from artificial and real hair (crocheted, embroidered), material and cotton thread (crocheted and unravelled). Shoes, figures, dresses, images, other objects, drawings. About: ideas to do with a woman’s life, a girl’s life, using some of the techniques traditionally linked to a girl’s world. and exploration of memory as of physical experience. Not necessarily concrete memories, more moods and atmospheres, remembered attitudes, emotional states, anxieties, hopes, desires, desire… interwoven with elements from fairy tales, myths, old and new.

the arms: releasing, letting go - pouring down, pouring out, emptying out, depleting - reaching, reaching out, reaching beyond.
The colour red speaks something different: blood, rage, energy, power, fire, passion, flesh, heat, heart, love, wound, confidence. The arms maybe about the fear of all that, all that teeming life within without, the beauty of it, the terror of it, its constant flux, and at the same time the desire for just that. Crocheting speaks neatness, industriousness, woman’s work, as does the shape of the dress. The long coiling arms underline and unspeak and speak anew a different alive.

It’s really taken a whole year to finish, almost to the day. Worked on the dress with lots of breaks pauses interruptions. While its body grew slowly, stitch by stitch, towards its imagined shape, shrunk dramatically when I wretchedly unraveled the mass of stitches that made up the not-quite-right-looking skirt and then steadily grew again, it took on various spectral forms in my head, some of which I sketched down, each time changing its meaning slightly.