I am picking up where I left off from our Wild Wonder exhibition in winter 2019. Today I am showing Blue Colony, a piece that is all in crochet. It was the first ‘serious’ craft I learned – from my mum and my aunts, and then through self-teaching. This was before YouTube! Along with knitting, it is my ‘go-to’ craft to chill and de-stress.
Wild Wonder became the trigger to experiment with paper, cotton, linen and wool yarns to create what I think is a ‘bowl’ shape, upside down. It is all to do with counting stitches and coming up with a blueprint where the stitches ‘increase’ or ‘decrease’ in a particular way. For the shaping, I opted for two ways: some of them had a mound-like convex dome, others had more of a plateau-shaped dome.
Indigo is my firm favourite right now. I would really like to learn how to die my own yarns, but for now, I am using a lot of Japanese-made yarns. I really like their quality and the craftsmanship that goes into them. I had doubts initially about whether or not wool would be safe to glue in this manner. I wanted to introduce a softer element, hence, the couple of pale lavender shapes which were in fine mohair. But it seemed to work and has complemented everything else. These guys turned out ok. Each one is different in their own individual way.
This group seems quite apt during our times, when we cannot huddle together. When I made this though, I was thinking of a coral colony sprouting and spawning in some tropical paradise. Here it was before it was framed in white.
The Art of Jeff Ting 