Needlebound by Daizy Chains / Hayley Mortin
Overview
Needlebound is a publication on fibre arts and artists created by Hayley Mortin, knitwear designer and founder of the Daizy Chains Project, a knitting project that combines digital art, digitalization and AI research with knitting.
Hayley Mortin/Daizy Chains
Hayley creates works influenced by data science in relation to developments in AI. Through her day job she is in contact with AI products and research about different aspects of AI especially in relation to data and imagery, all in the field of UX Design. Some of the images from these research papers find their way from her workplace to her knitting, and get reproduced in the shape of wearable, tangible items. Through this connection she opens up the conversation about the intersection of digital and analogue, and additionally the intersection of data and crafts.
The publication
The aim of the publication is to share projects, research and personal stories of artists active today in modern shapes of fibre arts, mostly knitting and crochet, as well as production of yarn, think dyeing and spinning. “A common thread in the fibre arts community is the shared appreciation for creating something tangible, a piece that can be held and felt in contrast to our screen-dominant lives. Needlebound provides a space where fibre artists can share their stories and perspectives in a place that is not dominated through platform algorithms.” (https://dazychains.ca/needlebound)
The publication features 34 articles that show the different unique perspectives on fibre art and its relevance for todays culture and art scene.
One aspects that gets a lot of attention, not only in Needlebound Vol.1, but also in several separate research papers and articles is the communal practice of crafts. In the Editors Letter, Hayley mentions fibre arts as being historically both solitary and communal, the act of knitting often transforming into a cultural activity that “weaves together social bonds”. (p.10) The more isolated and solitary side of fibre arts mostly developed through the industrial revolution, when the production of textiles and wearables was moved to factories, and the communal tradition of the craft was confined to those spaces, and eventually became a solitary act. (p.11) In “How Far Are You”, an article by Belinda Suen and Molly Berlin inside the publication, they have a conversation about their joint project of knitting the same sweater apart but simultaneously, and therefore touch on this topic of community. Molly Berlin says “Even when not physically knitting together with others, I think knitting is a perfect representation of communion. Knitting is pooling resources with each other […]. It is sharing ancestral Knowledge and traditions and information. Knitting for some has been survival and the survival of loved ones, or an expression of that love”. (p.59)
In “Spun Structures, Fluid Forms”, the article’s author, Valentine Geze, defines the grid like structure of knitting as the main factor of interest. She talks about how through her background in engineering, the structural approach to a handmade craft drew her to it. Additionally she mentions the inherently feminist nature of the craft, since “the history of garment making is inextricable from women’s history”. (p.24)
“Its associations with housewives became more pronounced after the world wars and Great Depression, when women were encouraged to knit for the war effort, or turned to knitting and mending out of necessity; knitting still maintains connotations with the familial structures, gender roles and tastes of women who embraced it long ago.“ (https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200630-how-knitting-became-cool)
Also mentioned by Emma Claire Foley in “Grid Limits” the clearly structural approach to such a soft medium seems to be of interest to multiple of the authors included in Needlebound VOl.1, as well as multiple of the researches in this field outside of the publication. In this article it is not necessarily the structural guidance of the grid that seems to be of interest, but rather the possibility of infinitive options, inside such a finite frame as the grid with its defined size and proportions. She also speaks on the fascination with grids that she noticed in herself and others, especially after her introduction into filmmaking. “If you think about it, the analogy runs to the foundation of the medium: digital images are formed by tiny points of light, and by patterning them at larger and larger scales, by making them sufficiently tiny, we can persuade the eye to stitch them together into a full, colorful image, grid after grid flashing by. […] The grid appears when things break down: people love to post the broken LCD ad boards across the city, orderly lines of cyan, hot green and red spidered over by cracks in the glass”. (p.39)
Thoughts
One of the reasons why this magazine seemed relevant to the research was the fact that, as Hayley says about the publication, there are not really any other publications that collect fibre artists’ perspectives on the craft, and provide such a space to their words. This collectiveness and community seemed particularly important to me since it is one of the possibilities I see for design to evolve and learn from traditional crafts. Design has become an extremely solitary act, considering not only working from home, but especially the withholding of information, resources and the shyness (or fear of plagiarism) that keeps designers from sharing their work with others. The solitude of the work is not only something that designers struggle with, but that, in my opinion, also influenced the industry as a whole to be more competitive and less communal.
(Mortin, Hayley (Hrsg.): Needlebound Volume One.)
