Liz Collins's Knitting Nation comes to the ICA stage
On October 16, artist and fashion designer Liz Collins brought her “army” of volunteer knitters to the ICA for a live performance of Knitting Nation, Phase 7: Darkness Descends.
In Knitting Nation, groups of knitters wearing costumes designed by Collins use manually-operated knitting machines to create a site–specific installation. Collins exploits the material properties of yarn, transforming it from yarn to line, from thread to material, from both line and material into planes of color. Her use of live performance means that these transformations happen in real time and are seen to be the result of laboring human bodies. Her performances intimate that creativity in art and fashion share many of the same principles, prime among them a reliance on the body as a site of both labor and display, and the use of the line to delimit and explore the boundaries of both the body and performance.
In Phase 7: Darkness Descends, five performers were dramatically spot-lit on a dark stage, heightening the presence of the ongoing drone of the manually-operated machines as the knitters performed. This was the first Knitting Nation performance to take place in a theater setting.
Phase 7 lasted almost six hours, with people dropping in and out of the theater every few minutes to see the performance. You can get a taste of the Knitting Nation experience in this video clip.
Collins returns to the ICA on November 25 for the next phase of Knitting Nation. Phase 8: Under Construction engages the theme of line (as explored in the exhibition Dance/Draw) through the complex interplay of lines across eight knitting machines stationed on various levels of scaffolding.