Crocheting and knitting
‘The hole is also the space occupied by the air we are breathing now, by the sunlight that has taken eight minutes to reach us, and by the starlight that is two thousand years old. In the space inside, or rather, through the sculpture, time is both present and meaningless.’ Jeanette Winterson, ‘The hole of life’, 2003
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Over the last two years after exploring the PLA 3D printing filaments, which enabled me to divide the space into smaller sections, I decided to incorporate string work in my forms such as weaving, knitting or crocheting. They are labours that best measure duration and effectively expose time into spatial form.
Tribute to Arachne, rebel sister, brilliantly gifted and who didn’t care less for the powerful – Marylin Pomian
By that I mean that the regularity of the weaves or repeated patterns is quite an accurate way of calibrating the passing of time and as the labour progresses, the weaves dissect the space into regular cells that take more space. These weaves become a transcript of duration where space and time are intimately interwoven.
I see these weaves as metaphors for a spacetime dimension where the strings are connections between past, present and future, allowing a way back and forth.
It references Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, where time is woven together with the three dimensions of space, forming a bendy, four-dimensional spacetime continuum, the ‘block universe’, encompassing the entire past, present, and future. Each slice of the block refer to different spacetime coordinates that can be accessed in the present.
In astronomy, ‘the fabric of spacetime’ is the term used to describe this 4th dimension, which either expands or contracts in the presence of matter.
It is also for this reason that knitting and crocheting has become an important process in my work.
Frederique Jones 