Stretching nearly two metres in height, Promenading is a large-scale example of Renee So’s ‘knitted portraits’. Created by hand on a manual knitting machine from the 1970s, these works reflect the artist’s ability to synthesize disparate visual languages into timeless, enigmatic character studies. ‘My desire to knit pictures was inspired by the beautiful tapestries I would see in historic houses and museums in Europe’, she claims, having grown up in Hong Kong and Australia. At the same time, her works draw together her the aesthetics of tourist export chinoiserie, ancient friezes, cartoons and Elizabethan fashion. Like her sculptures, So’s knitted figures are riddled with historic echoes, yet ultimately divorced from time and place: the present character, with his top hat, cane, ballooning trousers and doubled harlequin-esque face, confronts the viewer as a surreal yet curiously familiar hybrid. The artist delights in the raw, hand-crafted aesthetic of her works: ‘even though I’m using a machine to knit’, she explains, ‘there are still glitches and imperfections due to the handling of the wool and manipulation of colours.’ So’s work was showcased in the Saatchi Gallery’s 2010 exhibition ‘Newspeak: British Art Now’.
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