Postgraduate Artist visits Grey Coat
On Monday 21st April, Artist Celia Pym came to Grey Coat to work collaboratively with AS art students on her ‘MEND’ project. This is part of her final work for her MA studies at the Royal College of Art. Below Celia sets out the background to the project and how and why she wanted to involve the students here at GCH. This workshop followed a talk earlier in the school year about her work.
MEND
For the past year I have been working on mending, darning and repairing holes. I have asked people to bring me clothes with holes in through exhibitions, posters (put up travelling around the country on mending expeditions) and by email. I have mended the clothes not invisibly but with my own distinct mark and returned them.
I became interested in repair when I inherited my great-uncle Roly's sweater. The sweater is hand knit by my aunt Elizabeth, but had been so worn down in the elbows and sleeves that the original knitting had completely disappeared and in its place was repaired yarn. I found these marks of repair, different yarns woven in and out of each other very tender. I wanted to touch and mend people’s clothes with the same feeling that was in uncle Roly's sweater.
Darning is about making marks, marks that change the surface of the textiles being worked on. Traditionally darning is invisible and anonymous. I came to Grey Coat Hospital School because I wanted to see if I could gather some different darning marks. I prepared white knitted squares and asked students to cut holes in the squares and then darn them. I was interested to see how different or similar these darned holes and the stitch marks would be. A variety of blue yarns were provided for the darning. So that there was a uniformity to the holes and squares when finished.
My intention is that with the completed squares I will knit them together and make a blanket. A bit like making a patchwork quilt but because of the similar yarns and holes it would be more anonymous. All the students who participated in the cutting and darning will be listed as the artists (The blanket is nearly complete and I will send along an image of it when it is done) I am interested in the hidden and unseen but also how often things that are hidden are still known intuitively or instinctively. With this piece of work I was interested to see if the makers of the holes really would remain anonymous or if their marks would stand out as different from one another.
Coming to Grey Coat I wanted to let go of control of the darned mark making and to see what it felt like for students to cut into hand knitting. I loved that the squares took maybe a couple hours to knit but the holes only took a few minutes to make.
The blanket and photographs of the darning event will go into a catalogue of holes I am compiling.
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