Art preview: Loop, Tramway, Glasgow

Published on Thursday 3 March 2011 10:51

THE top floor gallery in Glasgow's Tramway is covered in a rainbow: thousands of colour-coordinated squares of fabric - red into yellow into green, blue, purple - startling against the cement floor.

A young volunteer is explaining to the 40 or so women there how to go about sewing them together into a blanket. Her words are being simultaneously translated into Punjabi for the benefit of half of the women in the room.

In fact, the whole venue has been taken over by women - fashion-conscious art students, young mums, older ladies in headscarves or comfy cardigans - sitting chatting, or in companionable silence, their laps full of knitting.

All over the building there are flashes of knitted colour draped casually over Tramway's industrial scaffolding and grabbing the eye.

The shuttling of four knitting machines, worked by three older women and a young man, provides a rhythm for the work force, punctuated by bubbles of laughter.

"It's like we're running the world's happiest sweatshop!" says Judith Williams, who, together with creative partner Ruth Janssen, claims full responsibility for the "joyful chaos" all over the building.

As Jetson and Janssen, they're the creative force behind Loop, a mind-bogglingly ambitious celebration of the centenary of International Women's Day on Tuesday.

What I've witnessed in Tramway is part of the preparation for the festivities, but also, in a very important way, part of the celebration itself.

The thousands of knitted squares have been collected from a long campaign to encourage women to "sit and knit a bit" and donate a square, an hour of time, and some thought to International Women's Day.

They've been created by local knitting groups all over Scotland; they've been sent in packages from New York, Oman, France, New Zealand, Brazil and beyond.

They're going to be sewn together into a giant blanket with 100 million stitches, representing the 100 million "missing women" identified by Nobel laureate Dr Amartya Sen (the figure represents a shortfall of female population, predominately in Asian countries, and presumed to be because of sex-selective abortion or infanticide).

Williams and Janssen came up with the idea during a creative residency at Tramway's dance space The Work Room.

"Loop is really a dance theatre piece gone wrong," says Williams.

"I'd applied for a residency to work with Ruth and some other women on a piece about women who run with wolves. Ruth and I were left alone in the space for a week in October, and somewhere along the way our project turned into 'let's make a hundred million-stitch blanket for the 100th International Women's Day'."I'd made a connection in my head between stories and bedtime, and the comfort that a blanket can bring you, and suddenly came up with the idea of a room in Tramway being covered from floor to ceiling in knitting.

"And then Ruth asked the very important question, 'yes, but why?' The figure of 100 million women just missing from the world was something we couldn't quite conceive of, so we thought we'd try and represent it in size."

"The numbers are just a means to an end," says Janssen.

"The point is that this project has really motivated and engaged people. Loop is the process, really: people coming together who wouldn't usually come together to talk about women. And knitting is so perfect for that.

"The blanket has all kinds of metaphors woven into it: the knitting together of people from all over the world, that it's been created from this ancient craft passed down through generations. And while we were getting our heads around the sheer scale of the blanket, Judith rather flippantly said, 'Why don't we have 100 events running on the day, too?'"

Yes. In addition to co-ordinating a gigantic, worldwide knitting project, Jetson and Janssen have put together a day-long festival, relying on nothing more than the goodwill of some of Scotland's best known artists, musicians, performers and writers.

Between 11am and 10pm on International Women's Day, anyone coming to Tramway can take part in dance, creative writing or painting workshops, or watch performances from starry names such as Janice Galloway, Alison Peebles and Daniela Nardini.

Scottish Dance Theatre and Janis Claxton Dance are performing short works. Cora Bissett is hosting a musical revue, and Kim Moore from Zoey Van Goey has set up sound installations.

"Essentially you can turn up at any time and put together your own programme," says Williams.

"Everyone's given up their time for nothing - we're basically running this out of our overdrafts - and it's been absolutely glorious, this outpouring of goodwill to the project. We hope it's going to feel like this on the day: the sense of women who aren't the same age, perhaps don't speak the same language, being able to sit beside each other and just be in one another's presence, creating something together."

Loop, Tramway, Glasgow, Tuesday, 11am-10pm. www.tramway.org

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday, 6 March, 2011