Knit One, Purl One
Photograph: Richard Davies, 2008
The Canary Wharf Group’s newest Sculpture in the Workplace exhibition brings Lyndall Phelps’s giant coils of knitted rope into the boardroom in a bizarre juxtaposition of the domestic and the business spheres.
The company has a great track record of injecting a bit of artistic soul into the bland corporate architecture of the giant office block and their latest installation, Knit One Purl One (on show until 20 March), is no exception. Australian-born artist Lyndall Phelps has placed coils of giant knitted rope in various locations around the One Canada Square building in a deliberate attempt to contrast preconceptions about the public (male) corporate world of business and the domestic (female) world of textiles and craft. The contrasts are also physical as the soft, brightly coloured coils – the 100-metre ropes are in yellow, blue and red wool – nestle on the hard, metallic surfaces of functional spaces like the water treatment room. They create a series of surreal juxtapositions that Phelps hopes will be thought-provoking and inspiring.
For Phelps, knitting has a particular feminist resonance due to its history as a craft practiced predominately by women. She is fascinated with the idea that it was associated with hard labour in Victorian prisons and workhouses – prisoners were forced to knit or make blankets to keep them busy and, possibly, help their moral improvement – and she uses knitting to explore ideas about the nature of women’s work in the past and their role in society.
