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The World of Illusion Knitting

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PICKING UP THREADS

This was written in
2007
so is now very dated

Several of the London museums share a vast store, away from the museums themselves. This was where I had to go. I knew I had to take all the right documentation to get past the security guards outside but, until I got there, I hadn’t thought about what this building might contain and how intense the security had to be. There are millions of pounds worth of treasures stashed away in that store. Once inside I had to wait to be collected by the Curator I had been communicating with and, when she arrived, she led me into the depths of the building, passing alternately through huge security doors and fire doors. Apart from the level of security it was no different from many other buildings. There was nothing to see as every door we passed was firmly closed. I was led to the Conservation Department and my Sainsbury’s carrier bags were taken from me with the utmost reverence. The staff were taking far more care of my work than I ever did. They may have cost me very little to make but to a museum every artefact is respected in the same way. Monetary value is of no importance. My hangings could have been made from gold and they would not have been better treated. I was told that they would be treated in some way to preserve them and then stored in tubes until needed. As far as I am aware they have never been exhibited – yet.

In the course of conversation, by chance, I told the Curator about Penrose. By a strange coincidence she was planning a Penrose exhibition and asked if the museum could also buy Penrose. I was happy to agree but asked her to wait a while as I was in the process of making a second version. The first had been in Steve’s choice of colours – red, orange and yellow. It was very striking and very effective. The colouring of the pieces had the effect of forming cubes that had disappeared or moved somewhere else when you looked at it again. I don’t like making the same thing twice but this was an exception as it was quite clear that a more subtle choice of colours would have very different effects. The second version was in three shades of pale blue-green. I liked it much better than the original garish version.

This is one of the few afghans that Steve and I have not agreed about. He preferred his, I preferred mine. We offered the museum a choice. They chose the red version and Steve still delights in mentioning this at every opportunity. For complicated legal reasons, the Penrose exhibition did not take place.

At the time we delivered Penrose, the Curator asked if I could knit a Peano curve. I had to admit that I hadn’t ever heard of such a thing. She did not know anything about the curve herself, except that she had seen a picture in a book. A few days later she sent some pages photocopied from a mathematical tome and we quickly decided we could not knit this as it just didn’t fit with the way we did things. It could not be made from our shapes as it was fundamentally a squiggly line crossing a grid. We kept the papers and carried on with other things.

12c. ART OR SCIENCE? continued