AN UNDOING

Wool & acrylic machine knitted poncho and scissors

(technical assistance provided by Cameron Miller & Matt Rogalsky)

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One part of a series of performative works, this video documents the unraveling of a machined ponchos made and purchased in Portugal that had over time become irreparably stained and shrunken.  In this "undoing" I am exploring the potential of goods as raw material and deconstruction as a form of Craftivism or in this case Re-Craftivism while considering how one might recommodify or decommodify the existing material world so as to decolonize the forms and systems in which capitalist ideologies are delivered or even enforced.

 

Always contemplating my role as a maker, this slow, restorative and meditative way of creating is meant to offer a alternative to the accelerated rates of production associated with the industrialization of skill and knowledge.  Can a small and quiet gesture be monumental?  Does this act reinsert value into the materials, resources, labour and processes that often go unwitnessed?  Is an "undoing" of entanglements that determine hyper-objects such as colonization, capitalization or consumptionism even possible?  To date, the work has taught me that all material has memory and that there are many stages to an undoing , some of which can not happen.