Anita Bruce
Anita’s intriguing, ethereal knitted creations draw attention to the plight of the natural world, as Katy Bevan discovers
This artist uses knitting to comment on man’s exploitation of wildlife
ANITA BRUCE and I met when we were both contributing to the UK’s version of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef at the Southbank Centre. Crafters had been asked to create coral forms, to raise awareness of the plight of the coral reefs and their battle against sea pollution. Anita’s contribution stood out, being neither crocheted nor hyperbolic, but was rather a wire plankton knitted in the round.
What I didn’t know then is that all of Anita’s work is about the environment and the threat that global warming poses to the delicate eco-system of the sea. “My work reflects my concerns about the exploitation of nature and the earth’s resources by man, disrupting this balance and resulting in habitat loss and accelerated climate change,” she says. “Knitting is the perfect medium for me to symbolise this fragile web of connections.”
At the Knitting & Stitching Show, her knitted wire plankton were pinned into frames, as if catalogued in a museum of natural history. I mistook them for fallopian tubes and other mysterious inner-workings - although this is not far from fact, as plankton also go unnoticed, but are nevertheless crucial to life.
Anita studied zoology as her first degree, then went on to study embroidery and to work in art-textiles; she is now a key member of the Prism art group. In 2016 she was the Crafting History textile resident at the Time and Tide museum in Great Yarmouth, where she created a collection of ganseystyle knitted herrings using a mix of traditional patterns and new ones inspired by the museum collection. The idea of knitting fish came from the herring girls who would have carried on knitting in between gutting the herrings, sharing their patterns as they followed the herring shoals and the trawlers along the coast.
Much of Anita’s most recent work has been site-specific, the place dictating the process. Last year’s ‘Felled’ for Prism abstracted the natural forms of exposed tree rings with embroidery, linking the age rings to the names of family that owned the land where it had grown.
Inspiration from science continued in her ‘Butterflies of the Soul’ project, based on the work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist, also known for the artistry of his drawings of brain cells. On discovering the structure of the nervous system, Cajal described neurons as ‘Butterflies of the Soul’, which Bruce has depicted in knitting, looking more like trees than anything brain-based.
For ‘Ghost of Gone Birds’, a collective art project working to highlight the plight of endangered bird species, Anita recreated hummingbirds including the Turquoise Throated Puffleg and the Scissor-tail, by studying preserved skins.
Anita has been knitting since the age of four, and admits to being lost without some knitting on the go. “I get a great deal of pleasure from it; it’s relaxing even when knitting the most complex of Fair Isle or lace patterns, but I also derive the same pleasure from knitting with wire.” It’s perhaps the shape of the stitch – the thread of life that links us all. “I am also really excited by the structure of the knitted stitch, and its linear quality – using wire and other experimental materials really emphasises this.”
It was discovering the joys of sock knitting that led on to creating some of her specimens. “The potential of circular knitting led directly to the knitted plankton, which are basically a variation, albeit complex at times, on the tube.” Far from flippant, her motives are genuine and this follows through to the techniques she uses.“It’s one of my unwritten rules that all the components of my plankton and siphonophora (a type of colonial jellyfish) are knitted together, never stitched with a needle – they are living forms, after all.”
MY WORK REFLECTS MY CONCERNS ABOUT THE EXPLOITATION OF NATURE BY MAN