UK DIY: Turnpike Gallery, Leigh

While we’ve been accumulating more and more mass produced possessions and our high streets have become increasingly similar, it seems a quiet revolution has been taking place. Rather than advocating violence or smashing up the system, its weapons are knit bombing and crochet, and a return to traditional crafts. Far from being outdated or old fashioned, though, the UK DIY exhibition at the Turnpike Gallery shows the place so called craftivism has in the modern world. Instead of being made obsolete by our ever more technology driven society, the internet has allowed craft to thrive. Creative projects around the world can connect with each other through blogs, online communities and online shops.

The exhibition, which celebrates the way in which craft is bringing back colour and individuality to the world around us, starts outside the gallery, with Manchester guerilla knitting duo ArtYarn’s tree encasing knitting, which gives trunks the appearance of bumblebees. Inside, artworks climb off the walls, take over the floors and hang from the ceilings of the gallery.

It’s an inverted world, where throwaway consumer culture doesn’t exist. Students from Manchester Metropolitan University put everyday materials to new, innovative uses, from necklaces made from tights to a candelabrum fashioned from mirrors and sink strainers.

Unwanted furniture and glass bottles find new lives, as do aluminium drinks cans turned into flowers. Drinking straw sculptures burst from the walls and hang from the ceiling resembling straw rooves and afros. Recycled skirts become a rag rug, reflecting the fact that 12 million tonnes of textiles are disposed of unethically in the UK every year. The message of the exhibition is waste not, want not.

Seedpod-like knitted balls and spirals hang from the ceiling. Knitted organisms, such as Anita Bruce’s delicate white, orange and purple crochet virus, seem alive and bulblike, about to burst into life.

A knitted landscape subverts expectations of what you’d expect to find in a gallery. Even the architecture is transformed: a plain pillar is clothed in what looks like a huge dog jumper, buttoned at the front, decorated with mosaic like patterns in lurid neon wool.

Craft goes far beyond the beautiful and useful, however. There’s a strong political vein - what artist Rockpool Candy describes as ‘fibre activism’ - running through the work on show, from a film of a tank knitted as a protest against the Iraq war to the reappropriation of cross stitch to convey such slogans as Thug Life. Eva Broadhurst and Lucy Semper’s animated film Making the Most protests about Leigh’s lack of basic amenities like a train station, theatre or cinema.

Faythe Levine’s film Handmade Nation, which we’re invited to watch through red, fluffy headphones, sums up DIY as a “lifestyle choice”, interviewing women who are keeping alive craft traditions and starting up their own businesses. DIY, they explain, offers the chance to “create your own economy”. Aptly for a film based in Olympia in the United States, home of the feminist punk movement Riot Grrl, the women are empowered by DIY as it proves “everything is possible”.

What many of the artists featured in the DIY exhibition have in common is a resistance to globalisation. DIY is a prime example of “people versus the machine”, offering the opportunity to “create your own culture” and “regain control of your life as opposed to having a corporation feed you culture”.

The exhibition isn’t just a celebration of craft, but of the whole DIY aesthetic, notably fanzines. Journalism is in a state of great change, not least in how we get our news and information. With the rise of citizen journalism and blogs, anyone can have a go. UK DIY reminds us, though, that there’s still something magical about the printed page and fanzines that blogs and websites will never replicate.

Right down to the paper on which they’re printed, fanzines are a labour of love, an artistic child onto which is projected all the hopes, interests and ambitions of their creator. Fanzines are often intricately worked - the very opposite of the immediacy of our fast culture, in which news is out of date as soon as it’s published. They range from the professional and book like to traditional typed or handwritten sheets grainy from the photocopier, and take in topics as diverse as the brilliantly titled Zine from the Imagination of a Ladysnail to Leeds zine Scratch that Itch, which recommends eating out of bins as a protest against our throwaway culture.

Some, such as those made by Manchester based New Think Books, are mini works of art. Elizabeth Dunning, from Preston, encloses her zine Any Old How in an embroidered 7” record sleeve, whereas others fold out or pop up. Although some of the zines have online versions, there’s something about the look, smell and touch of the paper, whether shiny or matt, textured or smooth, opaque or tracing paper, that a computer screen is never going to capture. Whether diaries allowing insights into the maker’s life or travel zines, all are born from the passion of whoever made them. The wonderful Don't Forget to Dance music zine typifies the obsessive approach to popular culture that motivates zines, pointing out that in fact it's often fairly niche 'unpopular culture'. Sugar Paper Zine, which details things to make and do, contains a cut out, dress up doll and recipes.

Yes, DIY might be nostalgic, but in a fun and irreverent way. Rachel Wild takes inspiration from 1980s computer games, making space invader brooches out of hama beads. Wildcat Designs also partake in so called techno crafting, knitting 8bit patterns in merino wool. Knit Happens prove that craft and rock n roll don’t have to be mutually exclusive, knitting Johnny Rotten gloves

The exhibition allows anyone to have a go, from tables dedicated to making jewellery and looms from plastic packaging to an invitation to embroider your name on cushions. Pom Pom International provide the instructions and materials to make a pom pom, which can then be hung on a pom pom tree. The pom poms will eventually be put towards the world’s biggest pom pom for peace.

www.ukdiycraft.blogspot.com/
www.wlct.org/arts/turnpike/exhibit.htm
www.flickr.com/groups/yarnbombingukdiy
www.unpopular-culture.com
www.diskant.net
www.mytarpit.com

Turnpike Gallery, Civic Square, Leigh, Gtr. Manchester WN7 1EB
Until 25th April

Buses run from Manchester Shudehill Interchange and Piccadilly Gardens to Leigh every half hour or so, and take about an hour.

ArtYarn knits the Shed Gallery, Levenshulme, a jumper for Christmas

There has been a growing interest in the home made over the past few years, even before the current credit crunch forced people to seek less costly goods and new forms of entertainment. Knitting in particular has enjoyed a revival and, far from being a solitary, spinsterish activity indulged in by lonely old ladies in rocking chairs, it's become more and more common to see groups sat knitting or crocheting in bars and clubs.

Inspired by groups across the world such as Knitta Please from Texas, and the textile artist Elaine Bradford, artists Rachael Elwell and Sarah Hardacre set up the guerilla knitting project ArtYarn six months ago.

Rachel, who is based at Islington Mill, attributes knitting's enduring popularity to the craze for all things “retro-vintage”. She says: “Knitting has made a big comeback in recent years, and people arebuying more handmade goods.”

ArtYarn, however, is separating knitting from its association with misshapen scarves and unwanted jumpers given by relatives who don't know what else to get you for Christmas and turning it into an “artistic medium”.

If you were at the New Islington festival at the end of summer, you probably saw ArtYarn's brightly-coloured 'tree cosies', tree-shaped garments adorning the trunks of trees in Ancoats. The duo also works in street art, 'yarn bombing' various cities, from London and Berlin to New York, by tying small patches of knitting to street furniture as “graffiti knitting”.

ArtYarn was invited to contribute to the Gaia project at this year's Liverpool Biennial, creating 'plastic bag bombs' out of yarn recycled from carrier bags found on the streets of Liverpool. Now, it's embarking on its most ambitious activity yet, knitting a jumper to cover the Shed art gallery - a small gallery run by independent arts organisation Pool Arts - at the Tonbridge Road Allotments in Levenshulme.

The project started with a joky remark that ArtYarn should make the shed a jumper to “keep it warm over the winter when it's closed”, but curator Alison Kershaw liked the idea. Each part of the shed was measured for panels of knitted patches created during public sewing workshops at St Lukes church, Longsight, and donated by the communities of Longsight and Levenshulme. Crocheted squares will tile the roof, pockets below the windows will hold flower boxes, and permanent knitted curtains will be installed.

Rachael likes the“social aspect” of knitting, and estimates there are at least ten knitting clubs in Manchester, including the Levenshulme Knitters and the University of Manchester Knittingsoc as well as groups that meet at the 8^th Day Cafe and Odd Bar. She set up the popular Kings

Arms Knitting Club in September 2007, saying: “ I couldn't really knit – I could do the basics but I wanted to learn some new skills such as crochet. After pulling my hair out over knitting books and youtube videos I realised the best way is to learn from other knitters.”

Through word of mouth, the club swelled from being a select gathering of three knitters to attracting ten to fifteen knitters a week. Rachael says: “Some weeks we can't even sit down – it's absolutely packed out with knitters, both male and female, ranging from beginners who have never picked up a pair of knitting needles in their lives to people who have been knitting for 40 odd years.”

Conventional garments and baby clothes are popular, but there are also arts students who knit with videotape and other crafts such as embroidery are encouraged. The most unusual work being created is Mexican wrestling masks.

The club meets in the Snug, a small room off the main bar at the Kings Arms, so it's not closed off from the rest of the building. Regulars, artists from the studios upstairs or people there for plays and gigs can wander in and look at works in progress, such as a spectacular knitted chandelier that's covered with French knitted tubes.

The knitters fund raise for Breast Cancer Care, and ArtYarn has further politicised a craft often seen as sedentary or old-fashioned by creating a blanket from 1,400 knitted squares, donated from all over the North-West, for the Manchester Oxfam Maternal Mortality campaign. Each patch represents one of the women across the world who dies in childbirth each day. The blanket was displayed at Beluga bar during the Labour Party Conference as a “knitted petition”. Rachael says it was effective in drawing attention to the cause as knitting is something “most people can relate to”, whether through knitting themselves or seeing one of their family knitting.

The Kings Arms Knitting Club meets at the Kings Arms, 11 Bloom Street, Salford, M3 6AN, every Monday from 7-9pm.

The Shed jumper project will be launched on Thursday 18 December from 3-7pm with mulled wine, mince pies and knitting demonstrations at Tonbridge Road Allotments, Levenshulme, M19. There is a frequent 192 bus service from Piccadilly to Levenshulme. Get off at The Wheatsheaf on Stockport Road, turn left into Broom Lane, then take the first right into Tonbridge Road.

The jumper can also be viewed from Friday 19 December – Sunday 21 December from noon-3pm

www.artyarn.blogspot.com

www.myspace.com/knittingkings

www.poolarts.org