Through Rows and In Stitches: a sweater as (an)archive
Tamsin Sloots
Port Loggia Gallery, 1107 Marginal Rd.
Graduate exhibitor
Through Rows and In Stitches examines the relationship between words, art and knowledge through a consideration of anarchival and research-creation practice.The anarchive, as described by Stephanie Springgay, Anise Truman and Sara MacLean, is not concerned with accurate capture of the past but it’s uncapturability: the “lived traces that are embodied in bodies and memories –and that cannot be contained or recorded in a text”.
Growing from the artist’s MA thesis work in Women and Gender Studies at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, this work uses the process-centric craft of hand knitting a sweater to explore how the anarchive might offer ways to queer, resist, or refuse the value and static notion of capture often granted to words within archival traditions. This work follows the artist’s process of handknitting a sweater from June to September 2022 and offers a collection of the (un)usual traces this process put out. It asks the question: how can hand-knitting a sweater be both an anarchive and a knowledge making practice?
