freddie robins

Today I have been looking at the Freddie Robins project "how to make a piece of work when you are too tired to make decisions" . Robins conceived the idea for this when her daughter was only a few months old, and due to lack of sleep and time constraints she devised a way of working that eliminated the decision making process from her machine knitted textile art.

She achieved this by using 3 dice to select predefined choices. One die was to select the colour of the yarns, one to give numbers for the stitches and rows, and one to decide the technique that was to be knitted.

The results are an interesting reflection of a serendipitous piece of work, and also of how many smaller elements can be assembled to create a larger piece.

Although different in many ways from what I am hoping to achieve, the idea of the project is an interesting one, and has strong links with the idea of random theory and probability, which is a possible way forward for my work.

Obviously, Robins has come from a very different starting point and so her aims and objectives are not the same as mine. Although Robins used the dice to determine a random pattern, she did make decisions that were preassigned to each number thrown and these decisions were altered as the process developed, in order to achieve 'more consistently successful results".

I am quite surprised to find how much I like the idea of the random nature of the designs, but not the designers interference in the process. This is something I think I will battle with in my own work. Relinquishing aesthetic control is difficult for a designer, especially when my main aim is to produce something that is both mathematically viable and an object of beauty.