Find Your Inner Metal Voice

American textile artist Lisa Anne Auerbach uses knitting as a means of exploring human communication systems. For over two decades, it has been her primary mode of expression, originally construed as a means of ‘writing’ bumper sticker-style slogans directly onto woollen jumpers. Included in the Saatchi Gallery exhibition Abstract America Today in 2014, Find Your Inner Metal Voice (2011) catalogues various self-help insights, reproduced as graphic speech bubbles which unfold across the surface of the work like a mind map. Evocative of Richard Prince’s ‘joke’ paintings, as well as Tracey Emin’s confessional appliquéd blankets, Auerbach’s works seek to highlight the endurance of the written word. ‘I might knit a statement that only rings true for one day or one hour, but the existence of it extends far beyond this short window’, she explains. Auerbach has mounted solo exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Malmö Konsthall, Sweden. Her works are held in major public institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.