Janet Morton: wool work

There's No Place Like Home: Janet Morton's Knitted Sculptures

By Sarah Quinton

In L. Frank Baum's one hundred-year-old fantastical story, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," an opportunistic cyclone catapults young Dorothy away from her beloved prairie home. The tale is told of this young girl's journey along the Yellow Brick Road from the fields of Kansas to the Emerald City in the Land of Oz, where she came face to face with passion, courage and braininess. It is these high spirited attributes that drew back the marvelous curtain of Oz to reveal an all-too-human (indeed, a rather timorous) wizard. Dorothy and her companions - the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and her little black dog Toto - personify Janet Morton's longing to impart the earthly magic of daily life.

Serious and wondrous, Janet Morton's sculpture pulls out the thought and sentiment embedded in the commonplace and imbues the everyday with worldliness heretofore implausible. Throughout the 90s, Morton made knitted monuments to her imaginative conjectures: Memorial is a four-and-a-half-meter-long gray, white and red work sock; Balaclava for a Rhinoceros is a made-to-measure pink acrylic adventure garment; Canadian Monument No. 2 is an oversized, red-and-black-checkered lumber jacket; Cardigan is a sweater made to fit a giraffe at the Toronto Zoo, and her Big-Big-Mitt is 140 centimeters long. Mittens, socks, jackets, garments for animals (think of an uptown poodle's winter wrap or a work horse's saddle blanket) do not typically engender imaginings outside of the dull interior sort. But Morton's informal, visceral objects ignite recollections and touch the funny bones of our collective experience.

Newsflash: Madame Defarge eat your heart out ¹

In 1995, Janet Morton spent the month of April knitting in a storefront window on Toronto's Queen Street. Morton worked for 29 consecutive days, with custom-made, oversized knitting needles made from wooden dowels. The resulting cloth was nine feet wide and over 24 feet long.

The left-hand side of a divided storefront window housed the artist and her chair, a great but ever-shrinking volume of multicoloured balls of wool (the yarn she knit with), and a continually growing knitted blanket. By mid month the knitter's lower body and the surrounding floor were swathed in the burgeoning artwork. The display window on the right contained three increasingly tall stacks of newspapers, one for each of the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Sun. Her Rock Knit Video faced the street and played throughout the day. In the video, Morton and her cohorts chase an enormous ball of wool throughout Toronto's financial district at an accelerated tempo, positioning it in unlikely spots and getting into all kinds of mischief - in a madcap manner reminiscent of the 1960s sitcom starring the made-for-TV musical group, The Monkees. The camera breaks away periodically to frantic images of the artist knitting in a canoe and lying on her back on the railway tracks, glancing over her shoulder as she knits busily away. A woman wearing a snorkel and mask knits in a bathtub and another woman in a tutu madly tears out her knitting with her teeth, under Toronto's Gardiner Expressway. All of this is interspersed with images of Madame Defarge, the female lead in the 1940s Hollywood movie version of Charles Dickens's 1859 novel, "A Tale of Two Cities," whose chattering needles and stern stare lend a sinister tone to this popularized rock-video take on knitting. As exaggerated and unlikely as this stepped-up narrative might seem, it is not unusual to see knitters at the beach, on the public transit, at the movies or waiting in long lineups - it's just that the activity is not integrated into the public psyche. Knitting is typically thought of as a private, intimate activity, part of a conventional roster of womanly domesticity.

Stenciled onto the shop's windowpane were the words Newsflash: Madame Defarge eat your heart out. Defarge, a French revolutionary in "A Tale of Two Cities," rigorously knit what she called ‘shrouds' (nobody knew what they really were). Her knitting ominously contained a coded list of names of aristocratic families who were to be beheaded at the hands of Robespierre's followers. When questioned about the security of this secret information, her husband and fellow revolutionary answered, "…if madame my wife undertook to keep the register in her memory alone, she would not lose a word of it - not a syllable of it. Knitted, in her own stitches and her own symbols, it will always be as plain to her as the sun. …It would be easier for the weakest poltroon that lives, to erase himself from existence, than to erase one letter of his name or crimes from the knitted register of Madame Defarge." Her death register preoccupied her so entirely that not only did her knitting stave off the discomfort of her wartime hunger pangs, but it also displaced any displeasure of her role in securing the horrid fate of entire families. Throughout the novel, she "leaned against the door-post, and saw nothing." Of course, this conveniently misunderstood business of knitting allowed her to see everything, as heads of the hapless aristocracy rolled to the counting rhythm of her clicking knitting needles - a prescient display of the symbolic power of knitting in a public domain.

Janet Morton's ritual consisted of inscribing the headlines from Toronto's (then) three daily newspapers into the fabric she was knitting. The word "newsflash" in the work's title is meant to be ironic - the artist considerably slows down, even meditates on, the news media's furious sense of urgency. Full digestion of the various versions of the daily news, while it is something that engages us all to greater or lesser degrees, is an impossible task. Yet at the very least Morton resists the ‘numbing down' that hyper-information can create. In the end, she translated masses of throwaway public information (the uninteresting, disturbing, intensely personal, amusing and the horrifying) into a singular object of warmth and familiarity. (Newsflash is infused with headlines that relate her own stories and in-jokes, injected during its manufacture.) The artist's Eat your heart out rejoinder to the historical character offers a saucy ambivalence towards the volumes of script created by our late twentieth-century communication systems. By subjecting the headlines of the dailies to her belaboured scrutiny, Morton softens the alienating effects of newspapers, but recognizes the unstoppable nature of the rushing techno-waters. She contemplated Defarge's distilled and purposeful (although unsavoury) information gathering, and the last line she knit into Newsflash is the first line from T.S. Eliot's melancholic poem, "The Wasteland" (1922), a rather grim exegesis on the inevitability of regeneration:

April is the cruellest month [, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.]

Cozy

Our most cherished everyday object may well be our home: something we (in the best of circumstances) may assume we all possess in one form or another. Home comes in various sizes and shapes, is located in every imaginable corner of the world and, as philosopher Gaston Bachelard puts forth in "The Poetics of Space," is the cornerstone of the poetic imagination. Bachelard proposes that humans require a safe haven in order to probe the imagination: Shelter (whether it is a temporary lean-to or the established family home) is the figurative centre of the imaginative journey outward into the universe, and inward to soulful intimacies.

For 18 days in November 1999, Janet Morton installed Cozy, a knitted cover for the house at 13 Third Street on Toronto's Wards Island. (Ward's Island, where the artist lives, is a residential community with a small-town atmosphere close to, but relatively isolated from, Toronto's metropolitan centre.) Over a year in the making, Cozy is a custom-made patchwork of more than 800 cut-up-and-pieced-together sweaters and hand knit architectural details, installed in preparation for the last winter of the 20th century. Bachelard proposes that "A reminder of winter strengthens the happiness of inhabiting. In the reign of the imagination alone, a reminder of winter increases the house's value as a place to live in." (Bachelard 40) By November, the trees on Ward's Island had bared their branches, leaving nearby dwellings unprotected: In contrast, the swaddled home nestled into the landscape and emanated comfort and security. Sanctuary.

The following spring, for three days in April 2000, Cozy was installed at Trinity Square, a public green space owned by the City of Toronto. Here, it was framed by a landscape of tall glass and steel structures, an historic church, corporate headquarters, condominiums and the Eaton Centre - a shopping mecca and one of the city's main tourist attractions. Installed on a scaffold framework (rather than on a house) Cozy became a powerful symbol of home. Shoppers, church-goers, retail staff, office workers and park bench regulars took in the transplanted domicile, ephemerally framed by the about-to-burst leaf buds in the landscaping that encircles the square. Draped with apparent effortlessness on its architectural skeleton, Cozy's four walls billowed in breezes that wound their way through the grid of pedestrian walkways, restaurant patios and the church courtyard. With each new gust, it was as though the sculpture took deep, deliberate breaths and pondered its new and unlikely, albeit temporary, circumstances. As it inhaled and exhaled, Cozy's restless skin permeated its inner city surroundings. Carrying with it the indelible imprint of 13 Third's marks of experience, the itinerant home was the hearth of the park, the centre of hominess.

Cozy's two installations bracket the turning of the millennium. In the Northern Hemisphere, the fall and the spring are for reaping and sowing: Agrarian preparedness, along with adequate shelter, is an essential ingredient for human survival. Ward's Island is one of several interconnected islands susceptible to the vagaries of the weather, geography (the islands are an ever-shifting sandy landmass) and politics. From the early 1950s until 1993, island residents were in seemingly endless negotiations with the local municipality about the leasehold of the land and their very right to live on the island.² Morton's own unfixed living arrangements on the island, as well as the vulnerability of the relatively secure island homes, adds another layer of meaning to Cozy's warmth and hospitality. Cozy was created in the context of the social, environmental and historic landscape of the artist's Ward's Island home, and is anchored in, but not limited by, local popular culture. In her 1997 book, "The Lure of the Local," critic Lucy Lippard speaks of site specificity: "The intersections of nature, culture, history, and ideology form the ground on which we stand - our land, our place, the local. The lure of the local is the pull of place that operates on each of us… it is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation." (Lippard 7) Morton's Cozy embodies the gestalt of a community: It represents a measure of humanity.

"No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home." (Baum 19)

Friends and neighbours gave some of Cozy's sweaters to Morton; she purchased the majority from second-hand clothing retailers. All are within a range of creams and near-whites; many are of natural-coloured wool yarn. When a material doesn't spring back to its original shape after being stretched or pulled, we say it retains the memory of its use. Almost all of these garments bear marks of wear - stains, worn spots, holes and mended patches. These physical marks and the familiar materials that carry them evoke real memories and illusory responses. And, there are pragmatic considerations: In maritime cultures, the patterns of traditional cable knit sweaters could be traced to the families of the fishermen who were at risk, at sea for prolonged periods. This is how the generations of men who were tragically drowned could be identified when their bodies were eventually recovered. Their sweaters, designed and made by wives, sisters and daughters, granted individuals and their communities an unabashed resistance to anonymity. Similarly, Cozy's bricks and mortar have purchase on a sea of stories and personality traits - not so specific, perhaps, because of its remove from the ocean's bad tempers, but as complete a memory bank as a quilted patchwork made from a family's favorite garments.

"wool work"³

Untitled (Garden Box), Untitled (Domestic Interior) and Casting Off comprise "wool work," an exhibition of Janet Morton's knitted sculptures made in 1999 and 2000: In this exhibition, Cozy is represented by a series of large- and small-scale photographs by Bryce Duffy and Christopher Wahl. The essence of the word ‘work' in the exhibition's title is productivity. As a verb and a noun, ‘work' denotes both the activity - the skilled process of making, or labour - and the result of that labour. As with Newsflash, there is a rigour in "wool work," where productive work is a catalyst for the emergence, or creation, of a public sphere.

The artist's dedication to collecting and recycling overflows from Cozy into Untitled (Garden Box) and Untitled (Domestic Interior), both of which are made of Cozy's scraps and leftovers. Portions of these useful objects, once relegated to recycling depots, have been modified yet again. Untitled (Garden Box) - a wall-mounted, wood-and-glass shadow box - calls to mind Victorian handiwork such as hair wreaths and mourning jewellery, crewel work still-life tapestries and embroideries that are often misunderstood as the sentimental dalliances of an idle, death-infatuated society. Rather, these Victorian portraits and decorative mementos were made as expressions of loyalty and friendship - as well as intricate and labourious plays of technical prowess. Morton has capriciously stretched cuffs, neckbands and oddly shaped remnants (punctuated here and there with a tiny button or a perfectly placed embroidered snippet) over wire armatures to form a petal- and leaf-shaped landscape. This garden box does not speak of loss or mourning, nor is it a platform from which she can boast her skilled hand. It is a contained, miniaturized, imaginative garden chamber whose glass door allows a through-the-looking-glass peek at her own waste-not-want-not exemplar. The sweaters are biodegradable no matter what form they take, but even if their corporeal life span is not extendible, they will always be the agents of poetic animation.

In Untitled (Domestic Interior) Janet Morton has dressed a collection of household furnishings with individually shaped pieces of Cozy's remnants. These knitted skins at once obscure and reveal the objects beneath, causing them (normally ever-so-familiar and therefore nearly overlooked, even invisible) to appear anew under various guises such as domesticity, history, leisure, architecture, daily life, even art itself. These upholstered (mis)adventures revivify a pat selection of commercially manufactured, handed-on household furnishings: standup vacuum cleaner; television perched on a side table next to the requisite potted plant; telephone (tiny pearl buttons are sewn in a circle to indicate the finger-holes for a rotary dial); floor lamp, complete with low-wattage bulb (to bathe the room in a comforting glow); arm chair; and a floor mat. The picture hanging on the wall - both frame and field are fitted with cable knits - becomes a fusion of object and image, procuring a phenomenological reading as well as a litmus test of one's proclivity for an appreciation of kitsch's ironic stature. This frame and its ‘contents' give us a ‘picture' of the knitted surface that obscures distinctions between the public, or high art realm, and the traditionally private realm of craft and domestic practices. There is a knitted teacup and saucer placed (just for a moment, it seems) on the side table next to the telephone. Morton pays homage to Surrealist Meret Oppenheim's Object (1936), a fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon: This icon of Surrealism's fantasy-driven suggestiveness infiltrates Morton's oddly antimacassared environment. Domestic Interior's hallucinatory effect appeals to our sense of the absurd. It upends our perception of the things we thought we had discarded, the things we thought we knew only too well.

The magnitude of Morton's exploration of labour finds its full expression in the extraordinarily fertile collection of stories that comprise Casting Off. Early in 1999, she extended an open invitation to contribute a knitted square inscribed with a date of personal or historical importance, along with the story of the significance of that date: "…You are invited to participate in a project entitled Casting Off… In the language of knitting, to ‘Cast off' means to terminate or finish. ‘Cast offs' are things we discard. ‘Casting off' is the nautical term for leaving land, the beginning of the journey. The purpose of this project is to mark the passage into a new century, using wool to tell stories, to reflect, record and celebrate the events in our lives, and to cast off the passing century…" ⁴

Morton made more than 100 of the over 400 contributions - nearly 300 knitted squares were contributed from around the world. Countless immigration journeys, birthdays, deaths and wedding anniversaries reside next to events that changed the world: The bombing of Hiroshima in 1945; the industrial chemical accident in Bhopal, India in December, 1984; the 1989 dismantling of the Berlin wall; the January 1991 start of the Gulf War… Pinned to the wall, floor-to-ceiling and edge-to-edge in random order, surprising relationships emerged: One square commemorates the assassination of J. F. Kennedy (November 23, 1963); nearby is the date of the death of the family cat (XV XI MCMXCVIII); Martin Luther King received the Nobel Peace Prize on October 15, 1964; and the last surviving passenger pigeon died on August 29, 1914. Simultaneous coverage of these up-until-now unrelated events brought together an irregular yet surprisingly cohesive mass of information. The stories are archived year by year in a scrapbook that houses the contributors' original letters. Literally and figuratively, Casting Off reshapes history through personal stories and historic documentation. It relies on the participation of others, and merges artist, process and product: The work of its making was an unpredictable, spontaneous and collective experience that simultaneously extended and conflated time and the events that have marked its passage up to now.

Confronted by our many anxieties about the quickening of time on the edge of the 21st century, Janet Morton's exuberant, hand-worked scale-plays speak of time-honoured traditions of making and doing things for people we love. Her sculptures are an extension of well being and extended kinship: They connect ordinary things to monumental time. They are both socially relevant and art referential. Newsflash, Cozy and "wool work" are manifestations of the artist's excesses and engagement with physical work. Her insistent use of cloth - with its inescapable opulence and symbolism - and traditional hand knitting links her work to craft and the creation of collective memories. Yet, the sculptures discussed here embrace an eclectic terrain that is as engaged as much with popular culture and personal values as it is with the folkloric homily: As long as you are knitting, you are not wasting your time.

Notes

1. "I curated the 1995 exhibition "Knit" in order to look at the appearance of knitting in the recent work of three Canadian artists. Janet Morton exhibited Newsflash: Madame Defarge eat your heart out, a multidisciplinary public performance piece. Naomi London (Montreal) exhibited The Sweater Project, a collection of non-functional garments made under her direction by a group of senior citizens. And Jean MacRae (Vancouver) exhibited Two Walking Days, a series of knitted ‘potholders' imbued with urban symbols, made while she walked around the city. The work of these three artists connects to photography, performance, clothing and sculpture."
2. "The Ward's Island community began in the 1880s as a settlement of tents. A writer for the Ward's Island Weekly reports that the intent of the campers was to "keep it simple." Residents envisaged a "city" of tents, each having a slight individuality, yet standing together as a whole. The first summer colony on Ward's in 1899 consisted of just eight tenants, each of whom had paid a fee of $10 ground rent for the season. By 1913, the number of tents pitched had increased to the point where the city felt it necessary to organize the community into streets. The evolution from tents to cottage structures progressed in stages with the building of floors, the addition of kitchens and then porches, resulting in the creation of the homes you see today." From Delwyn Higgins curatorial essay, "The Place of My Dreams: Toronto Island's Homes and Gardens," which accompanied an exhibition at Toronto's York Quay Gallery from March 19 - April 25, 1999.
3. "wool work" was on view at The Museum for Textiles from March 11 - July 2, 2000
4. The artist's invitation to participate was distributed to the Museum's membership through our newsletter, "Text." As well, 2000 postcards were hand delivered to friends and relations, and sent out to handcraft guilds, students and artists. They were available for pickup at the Museum before and during the exhibition. An immeasurable number of contributions came through word of mouth. Morton continuously added the squares to the installation until the end of the exhibition.

Suggested Reading

• Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964
• L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1996 (This edition is an unabridged republication of the text of the work first printed by the George M. Hill Company, Chicago, 1900.)
• Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859
• Louise Dompierre, Naked State, Toronto: The Power Plant, 1994
• Delwyn Higgins, The Place of My Dreams: Toronto Island's Homes and Gardens, Toronto: York Quay Gallery, 1999 http://torontoisland.org/islanders/placeofmydreams.htm#homes
• Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: senses of place in a multicentred society, New York: The New Press, 1997
• Witold Rybczynski, Home: a short history of an idea, New York: Penguin, 1986

Address from Director

Jennifer Kaye - TMC

The Textile Museum of Canada has a unique mandate to celebrate both traditional and contemporary textile expressions. Through "wool work," we have been able to accomplish both things within one exhibition. And, we are very proud that Cozy received the 1999 Exhibition of the Year Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries.

Through her juxtaposition of the traditional techniques of knitting with contemporary subject matter, Janet Morton amply demonstrates the flexibility and richness of textiles as a contemporary art making medium. We have enjoyed working with Ms. Morton on this project, and are grateful to the Gallery Stratford for helping us to present Ms. Morton's work to a broader audience.

We would like to acknowledge the support of the Toronto Community Foundation for the Cozy project, which is documented within this publication. We are also grateful to the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council for their sustained support of our contemporary exhibition program.

On behalf of everyone at the Textile Museum of Canada, I hope you enjoy "wool work."

Jennifer Kaye, Executive Director
Textile Museum of Canada

Address from Director

Robert Windrum - Gallery Stratford

Gallery Stratford is delighted to present this important exhibition of works by Janet Morton to our Stratford and area audience. We are grateful to the Textile Museum of Canada for making this exhibition available as Janet's recent body of work is a most appropriate intersection for Gallery Stratford's contemporary art programming and our region's long traditions of handwork and craft.

The artist's humour and thoughtfulness encourage us to re-examine our everyday experience, guiding us with her use of highly accessible materials in a very unexpected and unconventional manner. From the photo-documentation of Cozy to the incredibly diverse and moving support material that resulted in the collaborative piece Casting Off this exhibition stands apart from much contemporary art through its warmth and emotional investment.

I would like to thank Sarah Quinton, Contemporary Curator at the Textile Museum of Canada for her curatorial skill and insightful essay about Janet Morton's work. The essay expresses the importance of works, such as Cozy, to our understanding of the human condition in the contemporary world of the 21st century.

I would also like to thank the City of Stratford, the Ontario Trillium Foundation and the J.P. Bickell Foundation for their support and investment in Gallery Stratford's exhibition and education programming.

Robert Windrum, Director/Curator
Gallery Stratford

Acknowledgements

Sarah Quinton

This catalogue is an extension of the recent work of Toronto artist Janet Morton. In the essay, "There's No Place Like Home," I discuss three of Morton's projects that I have curated at The Museum for Textiles: Newsflash: Madame Defarge eat your heart out; Cozy, her 1999 and 2000 out door installation (a Millennium project for the Museum); and "wool work," her 2000 exhibition. I would like to thank Jennifer Kaye and John Armstrong for kindly reading my catalogue essay and offering their editorial advice.

I first became acquainted with Janet Morton in 1995 when she was creating Newsflash. It was witnessing this project, and its subsequent installation at the Museum, that laid the foundation for working with Janet on Cozy and "wool work." Morton's art is imbued with soft humour, which causes us to see ourselves in a light that is both complimentary and self-critical, as well as celebratory. I thank Janet for her relentless drive, her optimism and her resolve.

We could not have successfully installed Cozy without the support of the staff, board of directors and members of the contemporary gallery committee at the Museum. Former Director Sarah Holland worked steadfastly on many of its details, and Katie Lyons was an invaluable consultant as we mounted Cozy in public. Janet Morton would like to thank the Toronto Arts Council for their support of Cozy.

House owner Sean Tamblyn was extraordinarily hospitable - he continued to live in his house while Cozy was installed for its two-and-a-half-week duration on Ward's Island. Toronto photographers Bryce Duffy and Chris Wahl generously photographed Cozy both on Ward's Island and at Trinity Square, and their photos form an integral part of the exhibition, "wool work." A grant from the Toronto Community Foundation supported Cozy's installations in full: as a result, we were able to attain our goal of extending our reach outward into Toronto's urban communities.

We would like to acknowledge the contributions made by many of the Museum volunteers and members of the island community - from providing hot November lunches to distributing flyers and posters, lending vehicles, ladders and hand tools and welcoming the hundreds of visitors who traveled to the island and Trinity Square - with particular help from Luisa Milan. Jamie Smith provided engineering consultation, Jake Deal & Sabinska Binswanger made Cozy's buttons, Jennifer Angus's textile students from Sheridan College assisted with the construction of Cozy, and Parce Tong, a student in the textiles department at the Ontario College of Art and Design, fulfilled her internship requirement as Janet's studio assistant. Rick Dzupina, Craig Whiteside, Doug Moore, Fraser Smith and Rick/Simon were instrumental during Cozy's installations, working alongside high school students from Don Mills Collegiate and skilled workers from Tower Scaffolding.

Rob Gray has designed a catalogue that captures the intelligence and the whimsy of Janet Morton's art. We are delighted to be sharing this exhibition and catalogue with Gallery Stratford, once more extending the work of artist Janet Morton outside of our gallery walls.

Sarah Quinton, Curator
Textile Museum of Canada

© 2007 Textile Museum of Canada