Amelia Hills- BA (Hons) Textiles in Practice
Grounding through the Bizarre
I am a multimedia artist currently specialising in interactive knitted sculpture. Recently, I have been exploring how my knits can act as mechanisms for grounding. My project ‘Grounding through the Bizarre’ is an inquiry into how I can inspire viewers towards the practice of noticing. By placing my stripey knits in a natural setting, I hope to draw attention back into the surroundings. The tactile and familiar nature of knitting is appealing to me; I want my work to be experienced through touch by the viewers.
Developing my technical abilities is integral to my practice. The knitted dress was made by fully fashioning on a domestic machine and then linking it together. This process allowed me to incorporate the body in my work in a way that caters to the movement of the human form. I also spent a semester learning how to program the Shima Seiki, a digital knitting machine. The result embodied a series of long tubular knits in a variety of stripe and colour combinations. The machine I used is a 12 gauge, meaning the work produced is refined and delicate, adding depth to the quality of my knits.
Once combined, the dress, tubes and wearer become one piece, rooted within their setting. Ideally, this work would be experienced in a forest, physically connected to the surrounding trees. Max Porter’s novel ‘Lanny’ (2019) greatly influenced my work in this project. The protagonist Lanny builds himself a bower in a tree and fills it with found treasures. The small charms hanging throughout my piece are a nod to this practice; finding beauty and value in the discarded and mundane. Acting as small visual poems, both the trinkets and the overall piece are an ode to the childish wonder of creating narratives from and connections to your surroundings.
