Rather than jumpers, mittens, cardigans or soft-toys, when Australia-born, Dunedin-based artist Michele Beevors sits down to knit, the results are rather more dramatic. Beevors has been called “an extreme knitter” because she knits life-sized sculptures of skeletal animals.
The knitted bones are wrapped around steel or aluminium frames, then placed to look out at museum or art gallery visitors. While they may look soft and cuddly, Beevors’ melancholy menagerie ask hard questions about our relationship with animals, extinction events and our role as kaitiaki (guardians).
Various New Zealand museums and galleries have hosted the exhibition in one form or another. Now, it’s called Good Bones and is showing at The Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt until April. Then, it will travel to the National Wool Museum in Geelong, Australia.
When Beevors is not knitting she heads the Sculpture Department at Otago Polytechnic’s Dunedin School of Arts.
Michele Beevors, why did you knit a collection of life-sized skeletal animals?
I arrived in New Zealand from Australia and was looking for something to do at night. Because it is quite cold here, I decided to knit myself a hat, so I went to Spotlight to get some wool and then realised, as I was standing there, that I was a sculptor who could probably do something far better with knitting than a hat. The ideas just cascaded down from there. The first thing I did was knit a human skeleton.
Still, it’s quite a stretch to go from ‘I think I’ll knit a hat’ to knitting a skeleton.
I have a history of making figurative sculptures, so the first thought was, “I don’t really need to knit a hat, I’ll just buy one. Now, what else can I do?” I was working in fibreglass at the time and finishing up a series called debbydoesdisney, – a critical take on the Disney Princess range of toys.
I was looking at things like anorexia and high school bullying, the kinds of things female students have to negotiate but are never accommodated in pop culture, especially the Disney Princess range. [The Dunedin Public Art Gallery described it as “spectacle with a candy-coated surface, but behind this spray-on nostalgia there is a much more revealing acerbic centre”.]
But you’d never worked with wool before?
As a 15-year-old, I knitted a couple of jumpers and stuff – as you do – so I could knit. It was just one of the tools in the toolbox, really. After the skeleton, I started to knit a horse because my father, Mervyn, had cancer. Through horse-riding, we’d had a special bond, so the work started to become about loss – the loss of his life – and our relationship.
Then I read Elizabeth Colbert’s book about The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History and heard her interviewed on Kim Hill’s Saturday Morning Show. The book is about mass extinction events and looks at how humans are contributing to the latest one. That provided an environmental element to the thoughts I was having about loss.
It all accelerated in 2018 when I heard that, for the first time, giraffes had been put on the endangered species list. I knew that the Otago Museum had a skeleton of an adolescent giraffe in a box [it was bought from the Paris Museum in 1877] so I spent about three days with curators Emma Burns and Kane Fleury drawing and taking photos. I must have taken 500 photos…
What’s happens next?
I make a plan, I try to draw each animal and each skeletal element, I use photographs when I can. I try to knit with as few joins that need sewing as possible because sewing everything up and together is excruciating.
With the giraffe, I knew they had a taxidermy one in Sydney, so I conflated that with the skeletal remains in Dunedin. I put the pattern of the giraffe – a northern giraffe – on the bones so it’s not 100% accurate. The giraffe was an adolescent so it’s 4.4 metres tall.
How many animals have you knitted?
At first there were 10 including a horse, snake, little frogs, a turtle and a koala. Now, there’s a couple of kangaroos, an orangutan, a gorilla with a baby.
Why include children?
The children are important. In fact, I think they are the most important work because they are the witnesses to what’s going on and they’re the future but if there’s no animals, there is no future. In part, they were inspired not just by the state of the natural world but by the terrible state of American gun violence, especially in schools. Incidents like the ones at Uvalde and Sandy Hook Elementary School. They have backpacks on, little knitted backpacks.
Did you grow up with animals around you?
Yes, we had dogs and cats and fish and birds and turtles and chickens. The area I grew up was once a chicken-farming one, although those farms are long gone now.
When I was about 8 years old, we went on a school excursion to, I think, the Australian Museum in Sydney. It was a kind of a big moment for me, because I realised that God didn’t exist and science was right, that evolution was a thing. I was fascinated by the big display of skeletons where you saw the skeleton of a mouse next to the skeleton of a lion next to the skeleton of a crocodile. I could see how the concept (of evolution) made sense, that while they’re all different, there’s a similarity.
What has really come out in Good Bones are ideas about evolution and extinction.
What sort of reactions are there to your work?
Sometimes there are tears; sometimes people are surprised. They say, “Oh, that’s a skeleton. Oh, wait – they’re knitted. Oh, wow. That’s amazing”, but there are a lot of tears because it is an exhibition, in some ways, about loss. Some people see the baby gorilla in its mother’s arms and there’s an instant empathy.
Each skeleton is also a memorial to an individual animal. If you read the wall text, it singles out individual stories that, unfortunately, often end in tragedy.
What do you think opening up conversations about these subjects does that learning about it in school or reading a book can’t do?
Knitting is a really easy skill to learn, something that most people are familiar with. Often it’s associated with gift-giving and care – your grandmother or mother makes you a jumper – and that’s about them caring for you. That care, by extension, needs to be afforded to the animals and the natural world. The work opens up conversations and perhaps makes people think in a different way. There are multiple layers and multiple stories that can be told.
Good Bones is on at The Dowse Museum of Art until April 28.
