Felix Fords'
'Casting Off Knitsonik'
Showcasing local artists and creatives,
come and see what your creative community
has been dreaming up!
Art is everywhere and nowhere more than our local Hastings & St Lens Neighbourhoods. The Shop Front Gallery is a paid opportunity for local artists to showcase a piece of work and give access to all to experience a wide variety of local artist work- whenever you want!
Come and see our latest artist: Dr felix ford - "casting off knitsonik"
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Thurs 3rd September - Sun 4th October
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24 hours just walk by
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Afri-Co-Lab, 3 Marine Court, Tn38 0DX
About: 'Casting Off KNITSONIK'
Reflections a bout the work:
This exhibition showcases Felix’s KNITSONIK era; her creative process from then; and her knack for drawing knitting palettes and patterns from the richly-textured world. The display is inspired by the gridded notebooks she used to make her knitting charts.
Felix’s inspiration sources (factories, cakes, tins, etc.) are shown beside the yarn-palettes and knitting charts they inspired. Alongside her process, you can see Felix’s swatches and accessories, created using her practices of cherishing, colour-matching and pattern-design.
Casting Off KNITSONIK celebrates this hand-knit body of work as neurodivergent joy and feminist art achievement. It mourns a way of working no longer available to Felix, and marks a starting line for the work that will come next.
Casting Off KNITSONIK
photography by Mark J Stanley
Dr Felix
Ford
Artist
bio
Dr Felix Ford (she/they) celebrates daily life through sensory joy; material pleasure; and sustained, attentive processes. She’s a playful, neurodivergent, disabled artist who knows the 96 colour numbers for J&S Shetland 2ply yarn by heart; once raised silk-worms in order to record their sounds; and did a PhD exploring the domestic soundscape.
From making sound art to spending hours turning the textures of daily life into stranded colourwork knitting, to practicing her highly visual and expressive journaling method, everything Felix does celebrates the magic of ordinary life and insists we cherish it - and one another - more.
Felix is interested in joyous processes that bring us into deeper communion with each other and with where we live. She cultivates whimsy as resistance.
For over a decade, she worked with hand-knitting and sound-recording under the umbrella name KNITSONIK. Felix used stranded colourwork to record the details of daily life, and audio field-recordings to amplify the stories and provenance of craft materials and practices. KNITSONIK projects uplifted hand-knitting as an expressive cultural context undervalued by capitalist patriarchy.
Permanent joint damage from arthritis means Felix can no longer knit. She is finding new ways to celebrate daily life through her expansive journaling practice, and actively seeking out pathways for working with sound again.