Elizabeth’s Knitting Needle

Object Therapy was a transformative repair project I developed in 2016, that is now touring around Australia in collaboration with Hotel Hotel and the Australian Design Centre. While the emphasis was on introducing the concept of transformative repair to other designers and artists (for some astounding results), pragmatically I volunteered to do a couple of repairs myself. This was my first repair, that I did in collaboration with the conceptual jeweller Kyoko Hashimoto.

This is what we wrote in our artist statement:

This knitting needle, now sliced into pieces and incased in polymer resin, was accidentally broken by the owner during transport inside a bag. This was a sad event. She is an avid knitter, and this was her very first pair of knitting needles, given to her by her grandmother, when she was a small child.

The owner didn’t need a functional repair – she has lots of other knitting needles – but she did want something that preserved its significance of learning how to knit and the emotional bond with her grandmother. Now wearable as a bracelet on her wrist, its little slices speak of the repetition of knitting patterns, and the progression of life, year by year.