Close-Knit: Bound Together by Intimate Social or Cultural Ties

Close-Knit: Bound Together by Intimate Social or Cultural Ties

Lucy Chapman

Honors Candidate Exhibition

MAY 2 – 15, 2023

MEZZANINE GALLERY

Close-Knit is a product of the careful work of over one hundred women sitting in a circle, sharing their stories of womanhood, and knitting together. The women of various backgrounds, ages, races, and beliefs, each knit an individual segment that became a part of my larger work. As the women knit they told stories of eating disorders, assault, verbal harassment, the male gaze, body, law, religious trauma, sexual education, male authority, motherhood, friendship, affection, joy, empathy, knitting, femininity, and beauty. The women listened and pondered. They laughed and smiled. They nodded in agreement. 

The installation shows the multitude of knitted segments, created during the communal knitting circles. They are knit together into one entity, to show the collective experience of womanhood, and then deployed in the gallery space like a draped, tactile, yielding membrane. The inseparability of the segments symbolizes the various stories coming together to form a more expansive, more colorful, and more nuanced narrative. The work repositions a timeless tradition of knitting as a feminine craft of creating something useful, to instead form a body of work in which direct functionality is metaphorically shifted; it now embodies the time and experience of its collective making and storytelling without the distraction of utility. The work is suspended to create a bodily sense of weightiness, sagging and hanging with the pull of gravity, alluding to the weight of the stories that women carry. The accompanying audio was supplied by some of the knitting circle participants, providing a sense of the content of their shared discussions during the circles. Like the knitted pieces themselves, these audio segments were brought together not to form a seamless whole, but one unified by shared experience. 

Close-Knit unifies women to tell their stories and share each other’s burdens, by intricately and permanently connecting the women to one another. Just as individual segments are knit together, the women’s lives also become permanently intertwined. Their collective sufferings, joys, and ponderings are interwoven to create a stronger bond, imparting each of them with a sense of comfort in their union with other women. Close-Knit is the practice of active listening, fostering radical empathy. 

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Lucy Chapman is a senior Presidential Scholar for Distinguished Achievement in the Visual Arts from Montgomery, AL.  In her time at Wake Forest she has pursued a major in studio art and double-minors in art history and journalism. She is honored to have had the opportunity to represent the University on its most recent committee for the Mark H. Reece Collection of Student-Acquired contemporary art in the Spring of 2021. Lucy has exhibited in the Hanes Gallery’s annual Student Art Exhibition where her work was accessioned into the John P. Anderson Collection of Student Art.