Knitting is the new thing that has taken over my life, following fast on the heels of cooking and gardening. I studied textiles originally, as part of my primary teacher training course. It wasn't intended, I was thinking of either english literature (still a great love) or biology (an enduring interest).
I was glad I didn't go for biology, it seemed to involve a lot of stick insects. I met up with an old school friend recently who had followed the maths, physics, biology route and become a pathologist. Interesting, but I think I might have gone more for forensic pathology or research.
Anyway, when you got to my particular college of education, you were invited, over the first six weeks, to explore all the main courses available and perhaps choose something that you hadn't had the opportunity to do before. So I tried textiles, a combination of printing (never got the hang of it) and embroidery (all right, interesting in an academic way, but didn't thrill me). The deep dark structural textural things I wanted to do never came out until much later at a combined dance drama and mixed media adult education course.
Later I met an artist who worked in quick setting concrete, originally developed for the military so they could run a concrete air strip through an area within twenty-four hours. You could see how that would be useful. One of the features of this type of concrete is that it picks up surface texture in some detail. It's been used in two iconic sculptures by John King, one in Manchester and one in Liverpool.
A Case History by John King Credit: The Whisperer of the Shadows
After that, I bought a house with a lean-to at the back, tiled and with water and drains and power points. When I first saw it, I imagined building architectural sculptures mixing textural forms of knitting and yarns with concrete and fibre-glass. Mostly though, it houses the dishwasher, a handy dumping ground for the shopping while you sort yourself out with a cup of tea and somewhere to hang the washing when the weather is inclement.
So on we went into web 2.0 and creativecoffee club and social media cafes and #tuttle and my fingers were busy with devices and my brain with google and youtube and facebook and flickr and linkedin and myfitnesspal and fitbit and trips to Lift and university seminars and affordances and structural holes ...
The Olympics came and went. London was a charmed place that summer, sitting in my flat in Chelsea, bright sun on the walls, reading facebook, listening to Gimme Shelter and the sounds of helicopters overhead, flying up and down the river, people in neat helper costumes at South Kensington underground station, directing our many international visitors about the place, people selling kites in the pedestrian walkway and Billy's with its neon fish and chip sign filling up and emptying every forty minutes.
Oh facebook. If only you had never introduced algorithms and started filling up my feed with rubbish, I would never have put aside my iPad, and turning toward the window, say "That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all" and cast about me for something different altogether.
