epoch; 1.9m x 1.9m; Description: digitally printed knitted squares, deconstructed, reknit, and assembled together into one piece; Materials: 100% Australian Merino wool yarn and water-based pigment ink.

epoch (details); 1.9m x 1.9m; Description: digitally printed knitted squares, deconstructed, reknit, and assembled together into one piece; Materials: 100% Australian Merino wool yarn and water-based pigment ink.

Film photographs of my installation from the night of Departures: RMIT Fashion and Textiles Graduate Exhibition. Featuring the Holga 120 CFN and Kodak Brownie Hawkeye that I used to take the photos in my piece.

epoch

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?

While searching through old prints of my film photographs in an attempt to find a photo that I either liked enough or felt it had enough personal meaning to use, I found exposed medium format films – the impetus for this project. I recognised that they were the very last films I took, waiting for over 10 years to be viewed. I made the decision to have them developed and if any images were revealed, I would use as many of them as possible while retaining the repetition of each.

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.

2 of the exposed films I discovered packed away with my medium format cameras.

Film Processing packets (with my apology/warning about their age).

I documented my process using the two cameras that captured the photographs I used and also with my beautiful 45 year old Bronica.

Process documentation with my Bronica.

Process Gallery

A consistent theme across my work is an element of storytelling through process documentation.

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