Artist Statement

I use crochet nontraditionally to create large-scale figurative art and to invest the craft with contemporary significance. My work filters the culture of fine art through traditional craft, reworking and transforming the classical categories of portraiture, landscape, and nudes, and in the process confronting past and present biases and shifts in gender roles and identity. I am interested in how Western preconceptions of social status and progress determine the meaning and value of an image and its subject: what is represented, what is ignored, and why. My portraits depict members of society who are less seen, such as residents of the local AIDS care facility where I volunteer; my landscapes reveal the so-called progress that is dismantling the city; and my giant, ambiguous male nudes reverse the gendered tradition of male artist/female reclining nude. My Masks series portrays anonymous masked women and girls with a superheroic subtext. Another ongoing series appropriates and softens mug shots of arrestees in order to restore the humanity that has been erased in a single negative moment.

Crochet is a method of making fabric using a hook. It has a distinct language, older than and unchanged by recorded art history. It speaks to and of generations of women, and universally to everyone who has ever handled textiles. I was taught to crochet as a child by my Gran. It became part of my studio practice in 2006, when a local textile exhibition inspired me to unite my love of crochet with my years of experience as a painter. I developed my technique through long hours of tying knots, and even more unraveling.

My process is unusual: I work from an image using no plans or sketches, and mix the yarns knot by knot, building tiers of color like brushstrokes to define my subjects. With each portrait I always begin with the eyes, using the rows of stitches like lines to define the facial structure, working outward until the person is captured in my knots. The subjects are created from and contained within the handmade fabric, and the knots suggest units of time and reveal the physical process.

Exhibitions

October 2018 - November 2018

All Day

Fabric of Spacetime: Jo Hamilton

Jo Hamilton

Artist connects to the fabric of time in new exhibition

Textile artist Jo Hamilton has created a visceral link to the past with the crocheted work in her Fabric of Space Time fibre art exhibition, opening at Newcastle’s Timeless Textiles Gallery on 31 October 2018. Scottish Born, Oregon based, Hamilton is one of the world’s leading contemporary crochet artists.

Hamilton references physics concepts in the name of the exhibition: The Fabric of Space Time.She links the process and results of crocheting with the physics concept of time and space.

“Crocheting is an intimate process with long hours spent hand-tying and unravelling thousands of knots to create each work,” Hamilton explains. “The subjects are created from, and contained within, the handmade fabric.

In physics, space and time are fused into a single four-dimensional continuum, often visualised as a net. In crochet, the knots suggest units of time and simultaneously reveal the physical process.”

Hamilton’s grandmother taught her to crochet when she was a child. A portrait of her Gran hangs in the new exhibition. It links the work to the tradition of passing handcraft skills down through generations.

This common, familial and meaningful method of passing down handcrafts creates chains across time, linking us to generations of past and future women. Crochet is universally relatable, according to Hamilton.

“The fibres connect us as humans, both figuratively and literally,” she says. “We are wrapped in blankets when we are born, dressed our whole lives in woven, knitted and crocheted fabrics. We live and die clothed in fibre.”

Share the intimacy and be part of the web of space and time. Fabric of Space Time runs from 31 October to 25 November 2018 . It will be opened by Katherine Heinrich on Thursday, 1 November.

Find out more about Jo

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Jo Hamilton

Jo Hamilton

Artist Statement

Exhibitions

Fabric of Spacetime: Jo Hamilton

Jo Hamilton

Artist connects to the fabric of time in new exhibition

Find out more about Jo

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