Skip to page content...
View Submissions
- Please choose an option:
- Title of Abstract:
Releasing the Tension: Making Meaning through Mindful Knitting (Ref #90)
- Date:
- 05-09-2006 12:09:41
- Status:
-
Accepted
- Rating:
- 8
-
Details:
- ?Sometimes knitters are so lucky. When the world presses in too tightly, squeezing us between our desires and duties, we have a ready escape. We can pick up our yarn and needles. ?. Our way out requires little more than sophisticated sticks and string?. No one looks askance when we flee the scene by picking up the hobby that gives us room and time to think?
Since 2000, a wealth of texts relating to knitting as a spiritual or contemplative practice have been published, i.e. The Knitting Sutra , Mindful Knitting , and Zen and the Art of Knitting ,. Many of these texts centralise the ways in which knitting has significantly contributed to a sense of well-being, of over-coming difficulty, grief, loss and illness. The focus outlines a narrative of the maker; a progression from materials to completed object/s, which chart the progression from sickness to health. The over-riding conclusion appears to extol knitting as a therapeutic, contemplative practice, which creates for or engages the maker with a clear mental space that transcends the failure of the body and the general pressures of the world. In essence, knitting can save your soul , your body, and help you to heal yourself.
The move away from knitting as a functional practice to one of spiritual elevation, highlights new approaches to domestic craft activity. Although these crafts have a long historical association with disability and therapeutic recovery, this has rarely been celebrated within popular or academic investigation. The intention of this paper is to outline the ways in which everyday creative practices can act as a form of self-help, of addressing physical and mental well-being within a framework of ?new age? thinking, whilst adhering to cultural norms emanating from theories of Individualism. Can we therefore state that it is possible to ?knit ourselves better??
Focussing on the practice of amateur knitters and drawing from oral history research, studies in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and cogitative and behavioural therapy, as well as populist knitting texts, the paper highlights the socio-economic climate from which this new celebratory thinking emerges, questioning the meaning of making in the 21st century.
This paper therefore aims to present the ways in which knitting aided and encouraged a sense of personal well-being in the interviewees, and enabled them to function again within everyday life. In terms of general good health, mental and physical well being, and quality of life, the testimonies of makers will be contextualised within a theoretical framework constructed from sociology and the analysis of post-modern ethics demonstrated by Zygmunt Bauman. Similarly, the paper investigates the significance of knitting as a means of articulating the socio-cultural meaning of making within a climate of personal empowerment and individualism.
The purpose therefore of this study, is to provide an inter-disciplinary critical framework for the analysis of knitting that is not reliant on aesthetics, the object?s use value, financial worth or artistic merit, but on the less tangible and subjective values of well-being, emotion and self-expression.
Reviewer Comments: