Artist Pages
Greta Grip enjoys pulling the strings of what is traditional knitting and winding it around the digital age. Greta started to exhibit her knitted food in 2009, since then her practice has evolved from knitting QR codes to EL wire. Currently, Grip knits with her hacked knitting machine. She hacked it by removing its original brain and replacing it with an USB port.
Focused on a practice of exploring the use of layering texts and symbols, colours and textures; Grip’s work challenges the understanding of what knitting is supposed to look like.
Instagram handle: @greta_grip
Lee Jones uses participatory design and creates easy-to-use toolkits so that individuals can build prototypes and have a say in the direction of their own technologies. She also loves running e-textile workshops in makerspaces, art galleries and community organizations under the name Electro-Stitches. To find out more about her research visit https://leejones.ca
Instagram: @byleejones
The Life of a Small Town – Community Survey
Please fill out this survey to help artists Greta Grip & Lee Jones design the ‘life of a small town’.
What data would you like visually represented with our hacked knitting machine to document a full year of the Port Hope community emerging and recovering from the pandemic?
Click any of the images with example questions below to take you to the survey.
Life of a Small Town
Artists Greta Grip & Lee Jones invite you to help them knit the Life of a Small Town – a collaborative and participatory community project that will culminate in a visual and tactile documentation of a year of life in Port Hope as we emerge from the pandemic.
Knitting can be an isolating activity, much like our experience of the Covid-19 pandemic.
During the pandemic we have been thinking about how to tangibly represent community. Can we record community activity as a knitted row? In contrast to most recording methods, our record of the recovery will be an imperfect, tangible, soft, colourful, knitted tube. We will be able to gauge how Port Hope comes back to life, with each day or week of activity recorded as a different colour of yarn. It will require a collective presence for it to be created. We will have a visual knitted representation of The Life of a Town.
For this year-long project, Greta & Lee want to involve the community not only in the tangible record but the design of what gets recorded in the first place. The Life of a Small Town project involves a small portable knitting machine that responds to sensors (that the community will determine with the artists) and the community activates the machine to record life in Port Hope.
This project is funded through Ontario Trillium Foundation’s Resilient Communities Fund.
