Emma Roche, Hurl, 2023, Knitted acrylic paint on powder coated steel, 210 x 110 cm
9OP11
"I have put down my own knitting — I’m halfway through a jumper with slits either side that begin a few rows down from the arm holes, because I want to wear clothes without waistbands and mortal limits — to press play on a YouTube video that shows Emma Roche at work in her studio. She is piping out heavy body acrylic paint in bulky strands of blue using a syringe. Her process makes fabric of paint; once the paint is done on the drying rack, Roche is able to knit with it. I think of thick plastic shoelaces, cables, veins; I think of the strawberry laces that taste like sweet plastic on the tongue. Roche plans out the imagery that makes up her knitted paintings using squared paper like a pixel artist might, each square corresponding to a stitch.
Once the knitted painting is done, the artist straps sections to a large metal grid as though she is connecting pieces on a circuit board. The piece becomes taut, loops stretching to meet the tension of the angular designs on grids, like a face making itself as big as it can be — or it’s left the shape it wants to be, sagging like unironed laundry. So much time, so much work. And in the painting, and the drying, and the knitting, and the collusion, the imagery is no longer as lucid as the plans were. In terms of the knitted imagery people are used to seeing, this isn’t the intarsia you’d get on a homely jumper either. Roche may well knit scenes from inside the home, but home is abstracted by her process. The art is kind of comical, kind of grotesque. Coagulated, visceral. Materiality admits there’s something slapstick to what’s going on here — something slapstick to what we’re all doing, shitting and vomiting and cleaning all the time. Burdened with being alive."
--Gabrielle de la Puente
Once the knitted painting is done, the artist straps sections to a large metal grid as though she is connecting pieces on a circuit board. The piece becomes taut, loops stretching to meet the tension of the angular designs on grids, like a face making itself as big as it can be — or it’s left the shape it wants to be, sagging like unironed laundry. So much time, so much work. And in the painting, and the drying, and the knitting, and the collusion, the imagery is no longer as lucid as the plans were. In terms of the knitted imagery people are used to seeing, this isn’t the intarsia you’d get on a homely jumper either. Roche may well knit scenes from inside the home, but home is abstracted by her process. The art is kind of comical, kind of grotesque. Coagulated, visceral. Materiality admits there’s something slapstick to what’s going on here — something slapstick to what we’re all doing, shitting and vomiting and cleaning all the time. Burdened with being alive."
--Gabrielle de la Puente
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