Author: Lena Smith
A performance installation arrives on campus today, bringing students and local artists together to knit on the front steps of Occidental College. The group will continuously operate knitting machines in the space between Johnson and Fowler halls from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m, as part of the West Coast premier of Liz Collins’ ongoing project, KNITTING NATION.
Collins, currently an artist-in-residence at the college, plans to participate in this art installation along with her students. Her project at Occidental marks the twelfth KNITTING NATION installation; others have occurred in cities around the world.
Students and artists will gradually fill the steps with knitted material in various shades of blue and purple; the machines’ placement will allow the public to observe. While the knitters are working, Art History and Visual Arts (AHVA) Professor Mary Beth Heffernan will serve as an interface between the knitters and the observers.
The KNITTING NATION installations are performances, as much about showing the knitters working as about creating huge amounts of material. Collins designed the installations to provide visual images of people operating machinery, as they would in a textile factory. Although the knitters rotate throughout the day, the continuous mechanical production creates an element of “work ’til you drop,” in imitation of a factory setting.
As art, the installations remain open to interpretation, according to Collins.
“People see so many different things, and it’s all open. I’m not on a mission. I don’t have any agenda, other than to put questions in front of people,” Collins said.
Collins will keep the resulting fabric, with tentative plans to incorporate it into future installations.
Heffernan lobbied to bring Collins to Occidental. She worked closely with the college to plan the residency, securing space for the installation and arranging Collins’ class visits.
“I want us not just to have an in-class lecture or a gallery show, but I want Oxy to be the first west coast site of her next iteration of KNITTING NATION,” Heffernan said.
A $91,225 grant from the Kathryn Caine Wanlass Charitable Foundation, which supports artist residencies at undergraduate institutions, funded the project and Collins’ residency. The grant allowed Occidental’s Art History and Visual Arts department to purchase 450 pounds of yarn and knitting machines, which will remain available to studio art students in the coming years.
As part of her residency, Collins visited three art classes at Occidental and built a gallery installation in Mullin Art Gallery with help from her two assistants, Minami Otake and Mozhdeh Matin. On Nov. 4, she also engaged in a dialogue with Julia Bryan-Wilson, an art historian who writes on feminism and labor, which included a discussion of the historical significance of women in the textile industry.
“She and Liz have actually had an ongoing conversation since Liz’s first KNITTING NATION iteration, and so they’ve been interlocutors over all of the issues that are in play with this work,” Heffernan said.
Most of the students involved are taking Heffernan’s class, “Advanced Projects in Interdisciplinary Arts.” They have been participating in workshops with a knitter from Eagle Rock since September to learn how to operate the machines they will use during the installation.
AHVA major Elise Hampilos (senior) is a member of the class but has also been coordinating many of the logistics of the installation, such as finding knitting machines to buy and interacting with sponsors. She will operate one of the knitting machines during the installation. According to Hampilos, they have a pleasant feel and sound, but tend to have minor malfunctions.
“It’s like a typewriter going really really fast. They are super temperamental,” Hampilos said.
The machines are about the size of portable keyboards. An operator loads yarn onto the machine by running spools back and forth. During the performance installation, these machines will produce yards upon yards of fabric.
The entire KNITTING NATION project ultimately resulted from the inspiration that Collins finds in knitting as a means of creating.
“It was a method for creating fabric that worked for me, it helped me access some of my strongest ideas and inspired me to find other ideas,” Collins said.
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