Navigation, Nuance and half/angel's Knitting Map A series of navigational directions …

Abstract

This article is about half/angel's durational community installation ‘The Knitting Map’ commissioned for Cork's year as European Capital of Culture in 2005. In ‘The Knitting Map’ CCTV cameras located around Cork City captured information about how busy the city was, and these levels of busyness were translated into knitting stitches - the busier the city, the more complex the stitch. Yarn colour was generated in parallel from a weather station, and mapped onto a palette of yarns. These two strands of information were then uploaded to digital screens as a simple knitting pattern (knit this stitch in this colour), and volunteer knitters sat at twenty knitting stations in a wooden amphitheatre in the crypt of St. Luke's Church in Cork City and knitted. And they did this every day for a year.

This article is written in creative critical form, and has three distinct threads – (i) a creative critical argument, (ii) entwined quotes from navigation / knitting texts, and (iii) an autobiographical narrative written as a series of footnotes. It uses tropes of navigation, cartography and knitting to weave its composition.

This article is about two publics; one directly involved in ‘The Knitting Map’, and the other a public who witnessed the same project through the media controversy that described it. The article uses these two publics to propose a pedagogy of failure, and to suggest that the challenges of this project, and its unrelated media controversy, can act as buoys guiding understanding of the complex and difficult history of the Irish State and in particular its relationship to textiles, femininity cartography and colonialism.

Notes

¹ 13 October 2008 Dear Roisin, I'm writing this facing north, away from the sea, sitting in the study looking out over the spiral garden. The penstemons are still out in October, scarlet amid the grey.

² 27 November 2008 Dear Roisin, a north wind today, fierce as a slap, whipping up clouds with brilliant sunshine, so that pushing the buggy up the boreen with my new son, I am faced with a wide sky tumbled grey and white, sun on the hay field, with its abandoned cylinders of straw, and the brilliant green of the fields around here. I am ravished by colour, and the gorgeous simplicity of pushing my child up a muddy lane, for a walk on a wild day. But as he sleeps, I slip away quietly, and write.

³ This was one of the most complex of all our knitting stitches: Open Honeycomb Cable (knitting pattern where K=knit, P=purl): The pattern begins on the wrong side, so work one row knit before starting. Row 1: K2, P8, K2; repeat to end. Row 2: P2, C4B (slip next two stitches onto cable needle and hold at back of work, K2, K2 from cable needle), C4F (slip next two stitches onto cable needle and hold at front of work, K2, K2 from cable needle), P2; repeat to end. Row 3: as 1st. Row 4: P2, K8, P2; repeat to end. Row 5: as 1st. Row 6: as 4th. Row 7: as 1st. Row 8: as 4th. These eight rows form pattern. Repeat. (Matthews 1984: 63).

⁴ This section is adapted from Barkun and Gilson-Ellis (2007).

⁵ 18 January 2009 Dear Roisin, I'm writing this facing south, close to the wood burning stove in the Swallow House, on an icy day in January. Through a little window to the right of the stove, I can see the sea above a stone wall I built two summers ago. Counting summers in the frost, I navigate my writing to meet its heart.

⁶ 20 January 2009 Dear Roisin, today an African American man will be inaugurated as President of the United States of America, and I am sitting in front of the warming stove in the Swallow House writing to you. There is a heavy frost, and I can still see my breath inside this little writing house. I ran in the twilight this morning. My hands moving towards the pain of cold before my beating heart warmed them again.

⁷ TKM was exhibited at The Ganser Gallery in Philadelphia in April and May 2007. Margaret Kennedy worked on this exhibition for half/angel.

⁸ 23 January 2009 Dear Roisin, today it is bright and still. There is a wet chill in the air, and I write this facing west. It is a little warmer than when I last wrote, so I can sit at the table in the Swallow House. Today, Vittorio came out while I dressed the children and lit the stove for me. It is burning peat, old natural peat, not the polite brickettes you can buy from supermarkets. So I sit facing west in the little writing house with a view of blue sky and an empty raised bed, a naked damson tree and a tumbled stone wall. And I burn Irish earth to keep warm. Ancient Irish earth, burning slowly.

⁹ 26 January 2009 Dear Roisin, the fire difficult to light this morning here in the Swallow House. Everything a bit damp. The orange peel we dried to parchment to use as firelighters in the house, have taken in moisture, and feel like peel again. I'm facing north to warm my back close to the stove. At least I can't see my breath any more. The children have colds – chesty coughs and runny noses, so we had a broken night last night, Jacobo with me, and Vittorio sleeping downstairs near to Natalie. I had soft hair rubbed in my face at 3am, as a little boy giggled for glee that he was in bed with me. I am also full of cold, and battling it with Echinacea and blood oranges. Peter Foynes and Vittorio made marmalade yesterday, so that our kitchen was turned into a citrus sauna, as they tried to boil Seville oranges for hours on our cantankerous stove, which loses heat in the wind. Later Peter and I go down to the sea wall to see if we can see a date Toddy assures us he knows is there. But there is nothing but a wild grey sea, so that as we stand on the beach we gaze into a wall of grey amid a pinkish afternoon glow.

¹⁰ These were: STEIM Studios, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (June and September 1996); Institute for Choreography and Dance, Cork, Ireland (ICD) (October 1997, April 1998, June 1999); The Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, Department of Media and Visual Arts (March and April 1998, August and September 1998, April 1999 and September and October 1999).

¹¹ 28 January 2009 Dear Roisin, facing east into a misted up window. It's mild, so I sit without my coat at my desk with the lamp on, breathing into this precious space of writing and solitude. And for the first time this week, I can't see my breath. Yesterday I took the children to play group in Aghada looking out onto a glassy estuary across to Cobh. Natalie played happily with buggies and babies, and eventually accosted a real baby from a mum to sit on her lap. Jacobo drove the red car he adores and then sat and ate his snack before and after every other child.… Later Natalie is exuberant at Anna Beth's house singing out songs loudly with Fifi, as the three of them parade round the kitchen island. Anna Beth and I conspire to catch-up between bouts of nappy changing, snack fetching and refereeing.

¹² Artistically, the Directors of Smartlab Digital Media Institute (London), Arts and Culture at the Council of Europe (Strasbourg), the European Cultural Foundation (Amsterdam), Dance City (Newcastle, UK) and the Chair of Visual Arts at Millersville University (Millersville, Pennsylvania) were all struck enough by their visits to TKM in 2005 to invite half/angel to develop further projects with them. These were, respectively, Lizbeth Goodman, Robert Palmer, Gottfried Wagner, Penny Rae and Jeri RobinsonLawrence. Positive international media coverage of TKM included Der Standard (Austria, Alioth 2005), Helsingen Sannomat (Finland, Sipilä 2005), Stavanger Aftenblad (Norway, Andreassen 2005), Wysokie Obcasy (Poland, Pánków 2005), Newzy.fr (France, Guilcher 2005), BBC News (UK, Davis 2005), The Guardian (UK, Glancey 2005), Vogue Knitting (UK, Fawcett 2005) and Simply Knitting (UK, Bradley 2005). TKM was also the subject of a chapter in a PhD thesis (Sotelo 2009).

¹³ 30 January 2009 Dear Roisin. Rain. No writing yesterday because Vittorio had to go into work, and it was Thursday, so there was the Cuidiu (Irish Childbirth Trust) coffee morning. I've been secretly calling it Quidditch, because parenting seems just like playing hockey in three dimensions on a broom. There were fresh scones and jam and cream and tea, and the children disappeared off to play in another new play room. And lovely women, and much laughter. Somewhere in the blur of Quidditch, lunch with two toddlers in a café, shopping for supper, and all the hauling in and out of cars that that entails, I wrenched my shoulder muscles, somewhere deep inside. So I'm sitting here writing with a heat pad on my sore shoulder listening to the rain and writing to you. I've just re-lit the fire because it went out. Rain.

¹⁴ In an article written in 2006, Alan O'Riordan reports on a public forum about TKM, organized to coincide with the exhibition of the work in the Millennium Hall, Cork as part of the Midsummer's Festival. He wrote: ‘The Knitting Map became a symbol of Cork 2005's perceived failure. By its unusual nature, it became a caricature for a grateful media to lampoon; and, in the climate of recrimination which ran through the year, it was an easy target.’ But he also writes: ‘From the knitters' own enthusiastic testimony, nobody could doubt that the map meant a great deal to the people who worked on it’ (O'Riordan 2006).

¹⁵ Men were involved in knitting TKM, and were always welcome. But in the end, they were a tiny minority.

¹⁶ It was probably also the case that when TKM was commissioned in 2003, the Executive of Cork 2005 expected their budget to be far higher than it eventually was, so that funding for the project ended up as a much larger proportion of the overall budget than was intended.

¹⁷ For example, Daniel Libeskind's Eighteen Turns was installed as a temporary exhibit in Fota House as part of the programme for Cork's year as European Capital of Culture in 2005. This stunning architectural caprice cost almost the same as TKM to have as a temporary exhibit (May–December 2005) but did not attract a whisper of criticism over its funding.

¹⁸ 11 February 2009 Dear Roisin, difficult to light the fire this morning. I am out of small logs, and so have to light the stove with peat. It burns slowly, reluctantly, sending smoke billowing sleepily over the fields. Stunning day – bright, still and cold. Madge, a neighbour and dear friend, died yesterday in her ninety-eighth year. She was born in this house in 1911, and we loved her, and her gorgeous dialect from another time, her stories about dancing down at the Lios, and her twinkling smile.

¹⁹ The history of cartography in and of Ireland is closely bound up with Britain's colonial project to claim its territory as its own. See Brian Friel's play Translations (1981) for an exploration of the poetic and political impact of this history (Friel 1981). Sometimes this history has had violent personal consequences for the cartographer. In the early seventeenth century, Richard Bartlett, an English army officer under Charles Blount (Lord Deputy Mountjoy), depicted the taming of Ulster and the unruly O'Neill in cartographic form: ‘Barlett seems to have been beheaded by Donegal militants who, in the words of one account, ‘would not have their countrie discovered’ (cited by Smyth 2007: 17, from Andrews 2008, then in progress).

²⁰ For a discussion of this depiction of Ireland as feminine in relation to colonial Britain, see Tovey, Share and Corcoran (2007) and Cairns and Richards (1988).

²¹ 12 February 2009 Dear Roisin, there is a touch of spring in the air today. Last night we waked Madge down at her home in Ballykennealy. I am taken through to the back bedroom where Catherine, our beloved neighbour and friend and Madge's daughter, sits close to the coffin. I hold her tight and sit between her sisters and chat. I dash home for supper with the children, and then back again for the removal. The small cottage is heaving, and dozens of cars line the small road. I go inside briefly, and Richard hands me whisky. Later, sitting in the packed church, I look down the long aisle at Madge's coffin to see the photograph of her I gave to Catherine for Christmas placed on top of it. This beautiful image of this old woman with light in her eyes sitting in my kitchen briefly undoes me of my outsiderness.