Crystal Energy

American textile artist Lisa Anne Auerbach uses knitting as a means of constructing incisive textual commentaries. For over two decades, it has been her primary mode of expression, originally construed as a means of ‘writing’ bumper sticker-style slogans directly onto woollen jumpers. In Crystal Energy, executed in 2014, the artist uses a knitting machine to catalogue various insights offered to her by psychics, reproduced as graphic speech bubbles which unfold across the surface of the work like a mind map. This molecular-looking format highlights Auerbach’s structural fusion of thread and letter, prompting us to consider the endurance of the written word. ‘I might knit a statement that only rings true for one day or one hour, but the existence of it extends far beyond this short window’, she explains. Elsewhere, her works confront issues as diverse as women’s rights, the rise of megachurches and the proliferation of social media, as well as her love of cats. Evocative of Richard Prince’s ‘joke’ paintings, as well as Tracey Emin’s confessional fusion of craft and text, Auerbach’s knitted works use a traditionally overlooked medium to examine the complex mechanisms of human communication.