Why I made: I went to buy wool for a hat and ended up knitting a human skeleton
Extreme knitting: Michele Beevors works with soft wool, but her knitted skeletal animals ask hard questions. Photos / Elias Rodriguez for Mark Tantrum Photography.
Rather than jumpers, mittens, cardigans or soft-toys, when Australia-born, Dunedin-based artist Michele Beevors sits down to knit, the results are rather more dramatic. Beevors has been called “an extreme knitter” because she knits life-sized sculptures of skeletal animals.
The knitted bones are wrapped around steel or aluminium frames, then placed to look out at museum or art gallery visitors. While they may look soft and cuddly, Beevors’ melancholy menagerie ask hard questions about our relationship with animals, extinction events and our role as kaitiaki (guardians).
Various New Zealand museums and galleries have hosted the exhibition in one form or another. Now, it’s called Good Bones and is showing at The Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt until April. Then, it will travel to the National Wool Museum in Geelong, Australia.
When Beevors is not knitting she heads the Sculpture Department at Otago Polytechnic’s Dunedin School of Arts.
Michele Beevors, why did you knit a collection of life-sized skeletal animals?
I arrived in New Zealand from Australia and was looking for something to do at night. Because it is quite cold here, I decided to knit myself a hat, so I went to Spotlight to get some wool and then realised, as I was standing there, that I was a sculptor who could probably do something far better with knitting than a hat. The ideas just cascaded down from there. The first thing I did was knit a human skeleton.
Still, it’s quite a stretch to go from ‘I think I’ll knit a hat’ to knitting a skeleton.
I have a history of making figurative sculptures, so the first thought was, “I don’t really need to knit a hat, I’ll just buy one. Now, what else can I do?” I was working in fibreglass at the time and finishing up a series called debbydoesdisney, – a critical take on the Disney Princess range of toys.
I was looking at things like anorexia and high school bullying, the kinds of things female students have to negotiate but are never accommodated in pop culture, especially the Disney Princess range. [The Dunedin Public Art Gallery described it as “spectacle with a candy-coated surface, but behind this spray-on nostalgia there is a much more revealing acerbic centre”.]
But you’d never worked with wool before?