Knitting as Identity? - Reflections 1

The next few posts will be extending the talk I gave at Glasgow University as part of the Handknitted Textiles & the Economies of Craft in Scotland workshop series. I was working at the Public Day event at Glasgow's The Lighthouse Design Centre when I was approached by a journalist from STV. Among her many questions, she wondered how Scotland influences me as a knitter and as a knitting designer. It was an obvious question to ask given the context, but I had to think about my response because the twin questions of identity and heritage hang over what I do.

I do not think I would be working in a creative industry and specifically as a designer-in-progress if I did not live in Scotland. Glasgow has been good to me in the sense that I feel very supported and inspired by the artists and creatives working here - and crucially I have been welcomed by them and given opportunities to do stuff that I do not think I would have been given in my erstwhile hometown of Copenhagen. Copenhagen plays host to many artists and creatives, but theirs is a closed circle by comparison.

So, geography plays an important part but it is not my only concern.

Trevor Pitt stopped by Glasgow to exhibit his The Knitting Salon, an art installation exploring the role of class, gender, community and urbanity through knitting. He gave an enthusiastic talk Friday about his own background, what informs him as an artist and what makes him so interested in wool as a medium. I was particularly interested in his working class background and how this influences his work.

I think my own background has a lot to do with how I approach knitting as a practice and why I am not always easy around knitting-as-practice. I wish I could twirl around with my hands in the air and shout about how much I love knitting - like so many of my readers do - but I have a complex relationship with knitting.

I am a working class kid myself. I grew up in rural Denmark with a family who worked as day labourers, farm hands, cleaners, and unskilled construction workers (if employed). They obsessed over pop culture and football - but they were also the local eccentrics. My family may have been huge (and hugely complicated) but it also shared a pervasive sense of self-expression and creative exploration that was at odds with its working-class status. We never had any money, but we had paintings on the walls and sculptures in the garden. I was kept in a steady supply of handmade garments and knitted jumpers. I was very young when I realised I could do stuff and make things.

For me, doing stuff meant moving away from rural Denmark and getting myself an education. Knitting is an uneasy practice for me because it is something which is directly connected to my working class roots. I worked so hard to get away and now I am back where I started more than thirty years ago: sticks and string in my hands making things.

So, knitting as identity-making?

For me, identifying myself as a knitter is more than "just" being affiliated with a collective of (mostly) women who use a traditional handicraft to connect with others via knitting groups and social media*. For me, it is acknowledging and finally admitting to kinship with previous generations and my complex family history. It is uncovering family roots and exploring what defines me as a human being. Can I ever make peace with knitting-as-practice?

Obvious questions to ask: Am I really at liberty to define and create myself and my own identity (I would have said YES not so long ago whilst arguing that the concept of a stable identity flies in the face of everything philosophers have had to say over the last 100 years). Or are we caught up in a matrix not of our own doing? Pre-determinism seems like such a dinosaur and yet here I am knitting away..

What is it about the practice of knitting that is so tangled up with identity, I wonder?

* I'll be writing more about knitting and social media in a later post.

Wool Week Post-Script

We are coming to the end of Wool Week and I am exhausted. I have been talking knitting, sheep, heritage, yarn, textiles, farmers, design and history for so long that I am hoarse and my body hurts. I do not know what else I can say that I have not already said. So many words. So many kind, interesting people. Alas, we have also reached the conclusion of the series of workshops on Textiles and the Economies of Craft in Scotland organised by the University of Glasgow. I gave a talk yesterday about the knitting industry and the resurgence of interest in hand-knitting. The Q & A was really interesting and I personally took a lot away from the other talks too.

Over the next few days I will be posting a short series of blog scribblings about knitting, textiles, material culture and social media.

Hopefully you will find them interesting too.

Day Five: Conference

Today I attended a conference on the economics and culture(s) of wool. It was an interesting array of people assembled - from Jamiesons and Smiths' Oliver Henry via New Lanark's Aynsley Gough to environmental artist Kate Foster's explorations of sheepscapes. I had been invited by organiser Marina Moskowitz and interestingly I found myself spanning several areas as an (ex-)academic, as an educator, as a designer, as a retailer and as a consumer. It was quite a ... position. We dealt with various issues throughout the day. What was/is the reality of sheep farming in Scotland past and present? How does the Scottish landscape inform our decisions regarding  production and consumption? What is "heritage"? What is the reality of working within the wool industry? What does "wool" mean?

I have previously worked with The Wool Marketing Board so some aspects of today were familiar to me (i.e. how does the wool get from the sheep on the field into your yarn stash?) but I was really struck by other aspects. Kate Foster's work was deeply thought-provoking - not only was she the only speaker to talk about sheep as actual animals rather than products but she also engaged with the changing Scottish landscape and asked troubling questions about authenticity and identity.

I did not get a chance to speak with Kate, but I hope she will be back. The idea of my little knitting project coming from continual acts of violence is very unsettling.

Other topics we explored: 'locality' and negotiations of space/place; actual socio-economic implications of handknitting; textiles as identity-making; and the future of textiles within Scotland.

It was a hugely rewarding day. I came to it with a cold and a fair bit of apprehension (it has been years since I last did anything vaguely academic) but I left feeling re-charged and inspired. Maybe this knitting life of mine does have an over-arching narrative despite my misgivings.

(Apologies for the lack of photos. I meant to bring my camera and show you some of the beautiful Jamieson & Smith samples, but I forgot it at home (along with my purse and my tissues). You can always knit them in your head.)

I do want to know: when you think about Scottish knitting, what do you think of?

You can find more blogs participating in the Knitting & Crochet Blog Week by googling 3KCBWDAY5. If you have come here as part of the Knitting & Crochet Blog Week, thank you for visiting. I'll still be here once this week is over and I'm usually blogging about arts, books, films, language besides all the craft stuff. Do stick around.

Word Tree

Choppy seas recently. I'm not going into the details, but choppy seas. And so I'm making a Word Tree. A Word Tree is a very basic idea. You cut out small leaves from brightly coloured paper, you write down positive words about yourself (or get others to name your positive traits if you cannot think of any), and you tie those leaves to a branch you put in a vase on your coffee table/window sill.

I know the younger version of me would have called that idea all sorts of names, but these days I am a bit gentler, less derisive and less prone to name-calling. Although don't ask me to Feel the Fear or say icky positive affirmations into the mirror. I have standards.

A few assorted links:

• I absolutely love these photos from a quilt exhibition. How inspirational.
• I have discovered the entire In Our Time radio archive which has actually made the choppy seas much less choppy. Bonus joy: Lawrence Rainey appeared in the IOT podcast on TS Eliot. I shrieked with ill-contained glee. Fangirl. Related: The Scottish Network of Modernist Studies meets just down the road. Maybe one day..
• When craft & print culture collide: hand-sewn Penguin book jackets.
• The curtain at the Oslo Opera House is really quite special.
• I'll be in Edinburgh for work this week and I'll be heading here for post-work snacks. I cannot wait.

Reading the Past

The economic recession has claimed many victims. The first phase saw people losing jobs, companies going bankrupt and banks folding. Experts say that this first wave is over. Signs of economic growth are visible in the financial sectors. We are now living through the second phase: spending cuts have to be made. This is all very textbook Keynesian economic theory and I recommend reading up on John Maynard Keynes (quite apart from being a significant economist, Keynes was also part of the Bloomsbury group alongside Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and Lyndham Lewis) if most of the current financial news leaves you confused. Spending cuts hurt. Before Christmas, many of my physicist friends were shocked when spending cuts to the tune of £115m were made in the science research sector. When I graduated from university in Denmark some seven or eight years ago, I saw what huge spending cuts will do to scientific research. It was not pretty. My then-department went from being autonomous with at least six new PhD students every year to being yoked together with five other subjects and get one PhD student every other year. The departmental restructuring made for some interesting cross-pollination, but also for disastrous academic results.

And so I learn that Kings College London may have to shut down its Palaeography department in order to meet budget targets. No restructuring, no "let us marry you to Library Science (however awkward) or maybe History or how about Archaeology?" and no shuffling the cards. I am not just saddened. I am shocked. KCL is the only place in the UK to have a Palaeography department and, I believe, even the only place in Europe.

Palaeography, the study of ancient handwriting, may sound like a very obscure subject - and really it is an obscure subject - but it is also incredibly important to scholars. Printing being a very recent invention, most available written material was done by hand and scholars need to be able to decipher handwriting. You get different writing systems (think Cuneiform), different alphabets (think how different the Phoenician alphabet looks to the Latin alphabet) and then different ways of interpreting the alphabets through writing. Pre-printing, many European kingdoms would have their own way of combining and forming letters - Johanna Drucker is particularly good on this, if you want to read more - and some handwriting is only intelligible to specialists who have studied handwriting traditions of a particular area (South Germany, for instance). So much material is now being made available by library specialists, but now I wonder who will be around to read, understand and disseminate this material.

(If I had know that Palaeography existed as a discipline when I started university, I would have ended up in a very different place to now. As is, most of my knowledge is filtered through print culture, so I apologise for any glaring mistakes)

Changing the Game

It is not often that people are praying for my soul when I'm at knitting group. Tonight was certainly different. We got caught up in evangelical Christians protesting the play Jesus Queen of Heaven outside Glasgow's Tron Theatre which involved the press and some (rather bored) policemen. As odd as the praying thing was, it did not compare to walking outside and seeing some very offensive anti-gay posters and billboards being held up by Respectable Citizens. Such people seek confrontation and thrive upon attention. I was not willing to give them any satisfaction and I resorted to quietly shaking my head at the candle-holding and chanting men and women as I made my way home. The twentieth century is slipping away before our eyes:  one of its greatest intellectuals, Claude Levi-Strauss has died. I always assumed that he had passed away before I began studying critical theory, although I cannot tell you why, but instead Levi-Strauss lived to the ripe old age of 100. Rest in peace, you structuralist giant.