Conceptual artist starts with domestic staple to create enormous ‘tea cozy’ as covering for Humvee in gentle war protest
Shirley Klinghoffer was never the kind of little girl who sat at her grandmother’s feet knitting skeins of yarn into doll dresses. How times change. A Santa Fe conceptual artist known for bronze flowers cast from vulval imprints, Klinghoffer is wielding needles and cord to create a mammoth “tea cozy” fit for a Humvee.
Opening in the Muñoz Waxman Gallery at the Center for Contemporary Arts, the “Love Armor Project” involves at least 50 fellow knitters looping enough yarn to knit a house. They’re transforming a war motif into a symbol of peace. It all began a year ago as Klinghoffer grew increasingly disheartened by the Iraq war.
“Every day my heart is breaking for the men, women and children in the war zones — the daily trauma, the maiming and killing and so on,” she said
As a conceptual artist, Klinghoffer comes up with the big ideas, then decides how to present them. She has incorporated stone, steel, plastic and even deconstructed ball gowns into her work, but she had never touched yarn. So she decided to knit a tea cozy and drape it across a Humvee M1026.
“When a person is knitting something for someone, it’s showing love and trying to protect someone like a mother protects a child,” she said.
She found a partner in large-scale fiber artist Sarah Hewitt. The two women contacted more than 70 art world friends from Seattle to Maine, then set up a Web site. They decided to use the stiff cotton/polyester cord used in old-fashioned Venetian blinds, readily available at Home Depot, for strength, if not comfort. They knitted and purled the 1/4- to 1/2-inch in diameter fiber on size 13 to 15 knitting needles. Then Klinghoffer and Hewitt sat down with measuring tape and calculator to devise multiple patterns to join together for the “final fitting.”
“When I divided the template into patterns, I felt like I was fracturing the surface like fractured lives,” Klinghoffer said.
Accustomed to creating sculptures from woven fiber, Hewitt felt drawn by the ineffable sense of connection that bonds women who knit. “Everybody speaks the same language,” she said. “Everybody tells their story while everyone’s quietly working. And I love hearing people’s stories.”
It was Hewitt who took blueprints from the military supplie, then translated and divided them into patterns.
“I think swaddling something that is so hard and aggressive is a good start at getting people to look at something differently,” she said.
Like all knitters, the women made adjustments along the way. Button flaps substituted for rivets. A crocheted doily sufficed as a headlight cover. The knitters sent in their finished pieces without casting off to make them easier to connect.
Bernice Pearl of New York served as the “finisher,” a role she was used to playing for family and friends. “Shirley would bring me these bags (of knitted cord),” she said. “They were in perfect shape, but everybody knits differently –– some were looser, some were tighter.”
Santa Fe’s Jayne Nordstrom knit the vehicle’s right rear door. “It was very difficult to work with,” she said. “It was very heavy. Pressing down on the needles — I got sore thumbs. We had to climb up on tables.”
“We’ve got seed stitches, we’ve got ribbing; most of it is stockinette,” Hewitt said. “All of the borders were done with some kind of decorative stitch.”
Klinghoffer chose a blood-red cotton to blanketstitch the individual pieces together; she said the results remind her of Frankenstein’s scars. “Somebody did say this is the color of the sand and the rocks in Iraq,” she added.
Help arrived at critical points. Chaz Lopez of Unica Cleaners commercially steamed and ironed the piecework gratis. The McCune Foundation gave a small discretionary grant. Home Depot offered gift cards. New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs Secretary Stuart Ashman helped Klinghoffer contact the New Mexico National Guard to provide a real Humvee to model the cozy.
“They just wanted to recognize all the soldiers,” Sgt. Mark Weingates said after driving the Humvee into the gallery for its final “fitting” on Tuesday. “It’s not whether the war is positive or negative; it’s the soldiers themselves they want to show support to.”
So far, the group has experienced only one negative reaction to the project –– from a potential knitter. “For some reason, she didn’t quite get it,” Klinghoffer said. “She wasn’t happy about bringing anything from war into it. She interpreted it as supporting the war.”
CCA’s Cyndi Conn liked the idea of a joint project with the military. The nonprofit arts center shares space with the New Mexico National Guard. The Muñoz Waxman Gallery site once served as the guard’s tank repair house.
“I said, ‘If you can do it, I want to show it,’ ” Conn said. “It was such an original idea.”
The project has consumed a year of Klinghoffer’s life; measuring, cutting, knitting and fitting were part of her everyday existence. She has “six or seven” sculptures languishing in various stages of incompletion.
“I’m a person that really internalizes international woes,” she said. “I can’t live my life in some really comfortable place; I have to reach out to people.”
If You Go
WHAT: “Love Armor Project”
WHEN: Members’ preview 4-5 p.m. Saturday; public reception 5-7 p.m. Saturday. Through Oct. 5.
WHERE: Center for Contemporary Arts, Muñoz Waxman Gallery, 1050 Old Pecos Trail.
CONTACT: 982-1338
