My graduate piece for the 2023 RMIT Fashion and Textiles Design Graduate Exhibition: Departures.
epoch is a knitted textile piece combining photography and digital textile printing, exploring themes of memory, time and place.
Can you reconstruct parts of yourself once so important to your sense of self, but now lost through the passage of time and circumstance? Or, more importantly, would you choose to?
epoch is the natural culmination of many smaller scale knitted, woven, and printed studies where I explored the disruption of pattern, contrasts in pattern and texture, and dissembled and reassembled textiles. My goal was to explore and refine a series of digitally printed knitted swatches where I experimented with unravelling and reknitting them in different sizes and in different gauges – in what ways would the colour and pattern from a surface print be redistributed when reknit different shapes, gauges, and stitches. If I reknit the unravelled swatches in exactly the same way, how many swatches would look exactly the same way; how many times would I need to repeat this process before one would reknit with a recognisable print?
I found inspiration in the appearance of the negatives that provided the imagery, in crocheted granny square blankets, in keepsake patchwork quilts. I documented my process and progress with the same cameras that took these photographs and also with the other film camera I used during this time.
144 individually knitted squares, with twelve photographs printed on twelve squares each - as a reference to the number of exposures on the cameras I used to take these photos – deconstructed and then reknit in exactly the same way, assembled together into a textile that has reframed my memories into a collection to take into the future.