Krickle Krackle
Dorothy Ann Daly
15 October to 22 November

KRICKLE  KRACKLE

Krickle Krackle is an expression that I first heard in relation to children's drawings, scratchy drawings, maybe we would say scribbling in English. My son came home from kindergarten one day, he was very upset that one of his friends had said that he could only do krickle krackle, while trying to comfort him, it became clear to me, that that was what I had been trying to do with my work. Since then I have been trying to make Krickle Krackle crochet. I make drawings with the cotton, I start and allow the piece to develop, I use different stitches to make marks, I try not to worry about what it looks like and what it is going to be. To approach it like a pencil drawing. Sometimes I make doodles in my notebook and then try to crochet these.

I found it hard to let go of  trying to make something look like something and just make work. Normally when one makes a piece of crochet it has a function and is useful and pretty. I struggled to get away from this. My mother taught me how to crochet as a child, it is something that I grew up with, making things was what we did. It wasn’t called art though.

I use old pieces of needlework as sources for my work, I am interested in the women, who made the pieces and in their lives, under what circumstances they made the pieces. I have some work that was made by my family and other old pieces that I found in markets. I collect old pattern books and use them as a starting point.

I use crochet in my work with hand made and embossed papers. I am interested in using the crochet cotton to make different textures and qualities; I use various stitches and thicknesses of cotton to achieve this. I see crochet as a means of drawing and making sculptural pieces; this is what I’m exploring with this work. I start a piece of crochet and it develops as I work, it becomes clear if it needs to be in a collage or if it is a sculpture in itself. Some pieces I make as drawings that I pin directly on to the wall. I use crochet as a fine artist.