Old Friends

For the exhibition in South Dakota I am creating a fun house in the gallery space.  A fun house of vulnerability, if you must know.  In the way of fun houses, it will be verging on more scary than fun, only the scary part will be that people will be asked to be open and tender because is there really anything more scary than that?  In any event, I also do want it to be FUN.  To me, part of the fun will be a kind of fun house sensory overload with lots of colour.  

I was laying in bed one morning wondering how in the world I would be able to create enough handknit or crocheted colourful material (or even find enough handmade blankets secondhand) to create the walls of the corridor and rooms of the fun house, when I remembered that I have five, large boxes filled with handknit and crocheted pieces occupying valuable real estate in my studio.

Remember these?  My hundreds and hundreds of handmade squares and rectangles collected from around the world for this project?  I still got 'em!  They have been sitting in their boxes, still quite unimaginably dirty from their three-months lining a highway in South Korea.

I ask you, did these cats luck out when they entered this particular household?  It's heaven for felines around here.

For the past week, I have been bringing bagfuls of them home each time I go to my studio and washing them, batch by batch.  A textile conservator told me not to wash them (she recommended vacuuming them) but I prefer them to be as clean as possible so I have been washing them (I air dry them).  So far, so good.

I hope the people who contributed the squares don't mind that I am re-using them for a new project.  If you do - please let me know!  Like the old friends that they are, I can remember their names, that is to say, the names of those who made them.  I could pull some aside if you would not like your's used in this project.  But I hope you will.  I am very happy to find a way to bring new life into these beautiful squares.