Life/Blood at Wells Art Contemporary 2023, installed in Wells Cathedral from Saturday 5 August to Saturday 2 September 2023.
I was delighted that my 80 plus red knitted sculptures were selected for the prestigious Wells Art Contemporary as one of 28 site-specific installations. Have a look at the Wells Art Contemporary website for details of all the installations.
My original 40 sculptures, Red is the colour of..., had been selected for New Contemporaries 2022 and was installed at NC22 Humber Street Gallery, Hull and NC22 South London Gallery, London. For Wells Art Contemporary they were supplemented by another 40 sculptures and I presented the installation, for this context, as Life/Blood.
Life/Blood is a dramatic installation of multiple, red, knitted hanging sculptures. It’s site-responsive; shapeshifting, formlessness and unravelling, immersive, alluring, yet somehow, also, uncanny.
Here's a video of the installation:
Lifeblood brings strength and vitality. The human heart pumps 2000 gallons of blood per day, circulating through 60,000 miles of arteries, veins and capillaries within the body. Blood is life. In the Bible, however, blood is a symbol of both life and death. It serves as a sacred substance in sacrificial rituals for purification, consecration, and atonement.
Knitting normally has associations with comfort, domesticity, clothing and the body; it’s expected to be a private pursuit, benign, functional, perfect and finished. Using ‘sloppy’ knitting as a medium in sculpture, intentionally unravelling, with loose ends unfinished, subverts these expectations. Its soft impermanence and associated femininities remind us of our mortality. The tension between life and death is made visible in the vulnerability of the unravelling sculptures.
Installing multiple strands of knitting in public, in such an atmospheric and unexpected setting as Wells Cathedral, it becomes what anthropologist Mary Douglas describes as ‘matter out of place’. Unsettling, it will stimulate thought and conversation and a range of conflicting responses – attraction, repulsion, horror and hilarity.