Artist Olek reveals an entire two-story house covered roof to floorboards in pink crochet. This new yarn-bombed installation currently stands in Kerava, Finland where Olek worked with a team of assistants to stitch together huge panels of crochet that envelop every inch of this 100-year-old house. Olek shares:
Originally, this building, built in the early 1900s, was the home of Karl Jacob Svensk (1883-1968). During the Winter War 1939-1940, the family fled to evade bombs falling into the yard, but they didn’t have to move out permanently. In 2015, more than 21 million people were forced to leave their homes in order to flee from conflicts. The pink house, our pink house is a symbol of a bright future filled with hope; is a symbol us coming together as a community.
Isn’t that grand! I love this. I love the statement, the vibrancy, the life, the love, and the community of it. From Olek’s site:
A loop after a loop. Hour after hour my madness becomes crochet. Life and art are inseparable. The movies I watch while crocheting influence my work, and my work dictates the films I select. I crochet everything that enters my space. Sometimes it’s a text message, a medical report, found objects. There is the unraveling, the ephemeral part of my work that never lets me forget about the limited life of the art object and art concept. What do I intend to reveal? You have to pull the end of the yarn and unravel the story behind the crochet.
My work changes from place to place. I studied the science of culture. With a miner’s work ethic, I long to delve deeper and deeper into my investigations. My art was a development that took me away from industrial, close-minded Silesia, Poland. It has always sought to bring color and life, energy, and surprise to the living space. My goal is to produce new work and share it with the public. I intend to take advantage of living in NYC with various neighborhoods and, with my actions, create a feedback to the economic and social reality in our community.
Via Colossal Art. – Olek’s site.
I love Olek, she’s a crochet superhero! She brings so much depth and meaning out of this craft. I once came across one of her yarn bombs on the street in NYC, a delightful surprise.
She is! I love her work, and it goes to show that you can make art with anything, in any media, and you can make statements, too.
I love how, in the first picture, the bright pink makes it look like not a real house at all but a whole bunch of whimsy.
This is so amazing. And I love the patterns.
Giliell @ 4:
This technique is called filet crochet, anything you can draw on a graph can be a pattern. It’s kind of like pixel art. You make a mesh and fill in the solid “pixels”. Usually you see filet crochet in thread, not yarn. It’s fabulous at this scale!
This is actually a great inspiration to send some handmade hats to a charity for Syrian refugees. I usually crochet for a local homeless clinic but I found a ravelry.com group (http://www.ravelry.com/groups/hats-and-more-for-war-torn-syria) taking knit, crochet, and purchased donations. I think I will make some stuffed animals for the kids, too.
Stellatree
Oh, I know. I can crochet quote well even though I rarely do.
This is just plain interesting from a language point. In German, the fact that you use it for crochet makes it “yarn” (Garn), no matter what width. Anything you use for sewing is “thread”. Bobbin is literally “under thread”.
Giliell:
That is interesting, it makes me wonder why we categorize it as thread in English… Maybe because it isn’t wool? The mysteries of language!
Wow. That’s crocheting big time. A visually great idea to have the artist on the ladder.
Some random background info:
Kerava is a town about 30 km or 15 miles from Helsinki, Finland, home to about 35,000 people and one of the biggest breweries in Finland (Sinebrychoff/Koff).
Kerava (Kervo in Swedish) was born because of the industry (brickworks, tilemakers, Portland cement manufacturing, fireworks and furniture makers) established there due to the railway from Helsinki to Hämeenlinna (the first in Finland) in the late 19th century.
Karl Jacob Svensk was a cabinetmaker or a carpenter and one of the founders of furniture maker Kervo Snickerifabriks Ab -- Keravan Puuseppätehdas Oy, now defunct. The company was once one of the leading purveyors of furniture for public buildings. The name “Svensk” means “Swedish” in Swedish.
stellatree@8: I think it has more to do with how tightly the yarn is spun/plied. There is such a thing as cotton yarn. From what I can tell, it’s more loosely plied than say, DMC perle cotton or your typical crochet thread.