Kate Just

My visual art practice is focussed on the use of traditional craft forms including knitting, sewing, textiles and photo-media to explore feminist and queer histories or forms of representation through the lens of my personal experiences. Drawing on the historical association of craft with ‘women’s work’ and domestic labour, I seek to reinvent knitting’s potential as an embodied material language, a way of speaking one’s truth, sharing stories, or agitating for change. In all of my works, I question hierarchical value systems that place art above craft, and explore feminist issues and ideas: of love, care, repair, gender based violence, protest, and the reclamation of our bodies, lives and artwork for ourselves. In tandem with my work, I often create participatory experiences such as public knitting or craft circles, to expand notions of craft as performance, to create or connect to communities of other crafters, and to highlight the value of craft to creative self expression.

Anonymous was a woman is an ongoing art work that involves the repetitive production of hand knitted panels (16 x 16 inch) bearing the text ‘Anonymous was a woman.’ It began on an artist residency at Art Omi in Ghent, New York on June 10, 2019 (my birthday) and continued through April 2021. Stretched around canvas, each differently coloured work resembles a textile plaque. The muted tones of the work refer to a palette of jewels or minerals, natural or long buried treasures. Assembled on the wall in a grid, the works resemble a columbarium or monument to past lives or lost artworks.

The work is inspired by a quotation in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1928). In this feminist polemic, Woolf questions the ways women’s authorship has been judged as inferior to that of men, and systematically made invisible. Woolf says, ‘I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.’ Over time this quote has been rephrased as ‘Throughout most of history, Anonymous was a woman.’ Through the making of the work, I meditate upon the immeasurable contributions that women have made to culture and society, and mourn the losses sustained by the erasure or exclusion of many of these gifts from the canon of art history.