Last month Dec 2014 I was the artist in residence at the de Young museum . I had a whole gallery space to fill up with my big felted pieces and it was thrilling to see my felt up on tall white walls , lit with spotlights and stapled into giant swirls and ruffles. I was in the Kimball studio 5 days a week talking to people , making felt and conducting a huge crowd felting installation. It was extremely busy with people who really, really liked making felt flowers for the wall installation.
This is was all very interesting and I will probably have to lie on the floor thinking and eating chocolate chips for a month to recover. Towards the end we had so many people crammed into the Kimball gallery that I began to go outside and yarnbomb this bike rack to have a few tranquil moments.
This is a really good bike rack , 10 swooping loops to knit over .
I have wanted to get my hands and my knitting on this bike rack for a few years. This was not a project I wanted to do as a guerrilla attack , having 10 loops of knitting cut down by the Golden Gate parks department would have depressed me for 4 months. The de Young owns this rack so I was able to get permission to bomb it during my residency. It’s very satisfying to get to do something that you have wanted to do for a long time.
It is so much fun to stand outside and yarnbomb and look out at Golden Gate Park at the same time. It took 2 weeks to sew all the knitting up.It probably took at least 100 hours to knit the whole thing. I call my knitted yarnbombing “Traditional Yarnboming ” since most of my outdoor urban textile work is now done with felt making.
The idea for the de Young residency was for people to be able to talk to a working artist while she works. A lot of people talked to me while I was in the Kimball gallery but I often felt that they weren’t exactly talking to me , more like they were talking to the ” artist”. Like I was maybe something different than them. When I was outside yarnbombing people would be walking by with all the distraction and delights of walking around Golden Gate Park and the oddness of someone yarnbombing would catch them off guard. ” Which I love.
You know how people are about yarnbombing, tickled, bemused, pleased to have something to photograph, happy to get to touch the art, the knitting, enjoying watching someone pursue an idiosyncratic ,self directed art entertainment.I felt like people were really talking to me, directly, no projection , just a fresh alive interaction. What could be better than that ?
When the bike rack was done it felt like it was alive.
Streetcolor 