Some People

In my last post I showed a woven sock work from the Some People series. I was looking through my disc archives for images of art to write about here, and found the whole series of 8 works. So here they all are. The following text is from the last post - I didn't see the point of trying to paraphrase!

When I started using socks for weaving at the beginning of my Master's degree, I was making a large and time-consuming installation, and needed to work on something a little different to keep me fresh! The series was included in the Dislocation show at Kudos Gallery in 2005. All the works in this series are made from black and white socks. This was partly in response to the number of socks of those colours that I had collected, and knew I wouldn't be able to incorporate into the I Am Because We Are installation, but also because of the stark contrast between the 2 colours that would make bold patterns. The works that just feature a horizontal stripe pattern are plain weave, and the pattern comes from changing the yarn being used, in this case cut up socks. The rest of the works in this series are double-weave textiles (the square within the square, the cross, the vertical stripe). This means that the textile is two layers thick, with the pattern on the front reversed on the back (a black square surrounded by white, for example). Because of the thickness of the sock yarn, this made for a very bulky finished product.

I have an installation shot of the series somewhere. They were displayed in two rows of four panels (the textile is stretched over frames I made with my bare hands...). Each panel is 50x50cm square.

The title is from a song of the same name from the musical Gypsy. I had been incorporating the names of the donors into the sock weavings, but not with this series, so the meaning is that these are just "some people" rather than named individuals (as well as including the meaning from the song, that some people are made for a boring, conventional life, but not everyone, and not me!).