UCC Professor of Creative Practice Jools Gilson is just back from a week-long stay in West Virginia, a heavily Republican state in the Appalachian region of the American South.
Gilson was there on a residency associated with an exhibition called Mapping Climate Change: The Knitting Map and the Tempestry Project, which runs until mid-December at the Art Museum of West Virginia University in Morgantown.
Mapping Climate Change is twinned with another exhibition called Our Votes, Our Values, which features photographs, prints, paintings and sculptural works from the Art Museum’s collection, and challenges visitors to consider how their voting decisions relate to their values. It’s a topical subject, given that Americans go the polls on Tuesday to elect their next president.
One might assume that the arts workers Gilson mingled with would lean towards backing the Democratic candidate, but it is a simple fact that nearly 70% of West Virginian voters backed Donald Trump in the last two presidential elections. So, how does she think things will go on this occasion?
“The sense I got, from the people I met with, is that they are very nervous,” she says.
This is the third time in the past four years that the Mapping Climate Change exhibition has been installed at an American university; it ran at the Berman Museum at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania in 2021, and at the Kohler Gallery at Lawrence University in Winconsin in 2023.
“I think the curators at Morgantown chose it to twin it with Your Values, Your Votes because it addresses climate,” says Gilson. “In Europe, and certainly in Ireland, there are not that many climate change deniers, but that’s still a big thing in the US, and particularly in the Republican South.”
At the heart of the Mapping Climate Change exhibition is the Knitting Map, a project co-ordinated by Gilson and Richard Povall, her partner in the arts production company Half/angel, as part of Cork 2005, the year-long programme of events organised to mark the city’s tenure as European Capital of Culture.
Over the course of that year, the Knitting Map was completed by more than 2,500 volunteers – many of them older, working-class women – at a dedicated space in the crypt at St Luke’s Church on the Northside, working to a design created by tracking pedestrian activity in the city centre through surveillance cameras and climate data generated by the weather station at Cork Institute of Technology.
The Knitting Map measures 12m by 80m, or 960m squared, which is roughly the size of a tennis court. “The Map is being shown upstairs at the museum,” says Gilson. “And I have to say, they’ve installed it really beautifully, in a way that I hadn’t seen done before. The sheer scale of the thing, that’s what gets you when you enter the gallery. It fills the space entirely.”
The Map is being shown alongside the Tempestry Project, a smaller tapestry whose design reflects temperature changes around the world, based on data produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.
One of Gilson’s tasks, in the course of her residency, was to chat with visitors to the exhibition. One group of freshman students seemed surprised to learn that the Knitting Map had been the centre of some controversy at the time of its creation, when one journalist denounced the Map as “a useless monstrosity” and one local businessman dismissed the whole project as “a pack of oul’ biddies knitting.”
“Some thought this was because the map reflected on climate,” says Gilson. “But of course, that really wasn’t even in the public discourse twenty years ago. But others asked if it was to do with its cost, and I said, you’re not far off, you know.”
Much of the hostility shown to the Knitting Map in those days does indeed seem to have been related to its budget. The project was awarded €258,000 in funding from Cork 2005, which paid for a staff of five and rent on an office over a three-year period, along with the kitting out of the crypt at St Luke’s. A company called Sirdar provided €60,000 worth of wool by way of sponsorship.
Gilson believes that “good old-fashioned misogyny” was also a factor. “We had these incredible women, with these really incredible skills. When they were doing a complex stitch, it was not just maths, but complex maths. But at that time, in 2005, in a certain kind of context within Ireland, the idea of giving space to these women just wasn’t being seen as experimental, progressive and exciting.”
In West Virginia, one of the encounters that touched Gilson most deeply was with a waitress in a local café. Throughout the post-industrial Appalachian region, whole communities have been ravaged by opioid addiction, and the waitress was one of those who has been fortunate enough to overcome her dependency.
“She was very open about the fact that she lives at a facility called Sober Living,” says Gilson. “She told us she’d been to the gallery with other Sober Living residents, and they’d meditated around the Knitting Map. That really got me. It means so much to know that the Map can be so alive beyond the gallery.”
Now that the Knitting Map has enjoyed such acclaim in America, one might expect Gilson to feel vindicated about its creation. “I don’t know,” she says. “’Vindicated’ is a strong word. But I do feel really humbled. Most visitors realised that the map was women’s work. And I suppose the other thing about it is democracy. Maybe with a small ‘d’, and not in this heightened sense, but it was a work that anybody could participate in; anybody could come in, they were welcomed, and we would teach them to knit.
“I have stood by the Map all these years. It was really tough for the first decade. But now, as we come to the 20th anniversary next year, it feels like it has had its reappraisal. There’s an extraordinary degree of wonder about it, and I’m really proud that it’s still having all these conversations.”
- Mapping Climate Change: The Knitting Map and the Tempestry Project runs until 15th December at the Art Museum of West Virginia University in Morgantown.
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