On Knitting.

Vibrations In Time (2015). Oil on Board. 84 x 60 cm.

There  will be an art exhibition in a London Gallery in March called ‘Threads’.   The exhibition is a specially curated show for Women’s History Month.  Works of art from fifty artists from around the world will be brought together in ‘an international exploration of the threads that transcend the divisions of country, culture, language and religion to connect us all through our gender, humanity, experiences, friendship and relationships’ (Theartistspool.co.uk).  It is a great theme  and a percentage of sales will be donated to the Women’s Trust in London.

The idea of invisible threads connecting people across continents, cultures and difference through a common humanity appears at first to be pretty basic, even naïve.  T his is a bottom line, the first and most important consideration about our existence on this planet and it is a nice analogy.   Everything else, culture, religion, language, identity and ideology follows from this line of thread.  It took many thousands of years of development to separate humans into the categories and the countries which we now inhabit.

From a scientific point of view it could be said that the human body is by and large the same moving, breathing, living mass of cells, tissues and bones regardless of where it happens to live.   Naturally physical bodies adapt to different environments, but ‘bodies are bodies’ and variations are not that endless.  I am imagining here – what if those threads that connect us were all rolled up and pulled together so that we could bring everyone back to one starting point. On that metaphorical journey through time and history perhaps we could learn much about how knots of conflict develop or how threads got severed at  specific points along the way.  What an intriguing vision I have of billions of threads criss-crossing the globe, over and over being knitted into one gigantic ball of wool which we call planet earth!  Maybe that’s all we are, one giant big ball of wool spinning around in the cosmos, who knows?

Those complicated knots tie us up and sometimes seem impossible to unravel.   Threads of histories and relationships snap through trauma or are deliberately cut.  Yet, if we all held that simple thought of ‘a basic thread connecting everyone’ in our minds, maybe untying those knots and knitting things back together wouldn’t be so difficult.  Perhaps understanding how we feel connected to places and people across time and place would be darned easier.

Needless to say there are expert explanations to all of the above and great academic and scientific analysis to be had on all of my woolly musings. However, for the moment I feel lots of invisible threads attached to me, some dangerously thinning over time, yet others are strong and fast and enduring and they will keep me rolling along.   These latter threads are those without which I would unravel, and be lost.