Abstract

In a dialogue with Catherine Dormor’s book, A Philosophy of Textile (2020), this paper argues that knitting has a unique position in the sphere of textile. To understand the technique as both practice and theory is not only to acknowledge its potency as expression and reflection, but also to perceive textile in a broader perspective. Starting with the article Offset, Buch- und Werbekunst (Offset, Printing, and Commercial Art) written by one of the key figures of the Bauhaus weaving workshop, Gunta Stölzl in 1926, I outline the historical context, and justify the significance of my research. Employing the concept—championed by the artist/psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger—, the Matrix, in particular together with (Inter)relationship, Techne as Dormor suggests, I navigate knitting in general as well as my own practice. By closely inspecting knitting as a mode of both making and thinking, this paper proves that knitting has a capacity to embody multiple layers of time and space, and by doing so, becomes a meaning-making device whose production questions, challenges and overturns hierarchical and binaristic modes of thinking.