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With Covid-19 ravaging populations and the World trying to come to terms with lockdown reality, it seems an appropriate moment to reactivate this Platform-7 project from 2013 exploring the trauma that follows on from a sudden shocking change in circumstance.
 Liz Hide in Liverpool...As I knitted, I thought about two brothers, William and Garnet, who were (I think) distant great uncles of my dad and were both killed as young men in the First World War... |  Liz Hide in Liverpool...Maybe fifteen or twenty years ago, my mum traced, and met, two elderly ladies who had been engaged to William and Garnet before they went to war. After losing their young men in the war, neither of the ladies had gone on to marry, but had remained friends for all these years since... |  Liz Hide in Liverpool...I never met those ladies, I don’t know their names, and I certainly don’t know whether they knitted. But I imagine how they, and countless of their peers, might have knitted their love into socks to ease the awful privations of William and Garnet in the trenches... |
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 Liz Hide in Liverpool...And when their boys didn’t come back, I imagine how these young women might have knitted their pain into soft and fine clothes to wear close to their skin... |  Newark Artists & Writers in Newark...Yesterday was really moving as we learnt a lot about the town we live in... |  Newark Artists & Writers in Newark...and for me personally, about an awful loss of life on the road I live on... |
 Newark Artists & Writers in Newark...In August 1941, a British bomber crashed onto a house in London Road, Balderton and burst into flames... |  Newark Artists & Writers in Newark...Two of the crew and 6 children who were asleep in the house were killed. Their mother just managed to escape with one of her sons... |  Newark Artists & Writers in Newark...Their father who was working on the railway saw the crash and thought that it was near his home but carried on working until his shift finished a 6pm... |
 Newark Artists & Writers in Newark...We thought about laying a wreath there but thought it best to be sensitive to the people who live in the house on that site now... |  Newark Artists & Writers in Newark...Lace placed at the site of Ransome and Marles munitions factory in Newark... |  Newark Artists & Writers in Newark...which was bombed killing 41 people during WW2, the date of which was thereafter named ‘Newark’s Blackest Day... |
 Sharon Shipp Hall in Ticehurst...I was quite anxious about doing it, no second takes and all that, and I hate to be photographed/videoed LOL. Wanting it to be right... |  Sharon Shipp Hall in Ticehurst...The silence of the knitting struck me not just as that contemplative/wishful silence as you describe, but also a furious silence in which thousands of women attacked yarn as they battled their own fears and hardships in having to cope without their menfolk in difficult and anxious times, let alone that the men may never return... |
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Images & Copyright: Liz Hide (Liverpool) Elaine Winter & Gill Jennison (Newark) Sharon Shipp Hall (Ticehurst)
11th November 2013
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