Tufting: knit with a gun
How did tufting, a craft whose roots stretch back to the world’s oldest rug, the Pazyryk Carpet, become a provocative underground movement in contemporary art?
Yes – I’m talking about carpet – but I can assure you this story’s a bloody good one, so let’s take a journey through time and space to, um, unravel the story of tufting and its recent resurgence.
Ancient Egyptians, the Tang Dynasty, and the Middle Ages were all into tufted textiles in a big way. In our lifetime, textiles have been more folkart than provocateur – think back to that disfigured Macramé owl you made in elementary school, and that scratchy cardigan your grandmother knitted – how could it possibly be so hot right now?
Enter Tim Ead, a modern-day maestro on a mission to revolutionize the world with wool. With his organisation aptly named ‘Tuft the World,’ Tim’s been championing tufting as a form of contemporary art since 2018.
Ead started an online tufting community, and his store made electric tufting guns easily accessible. Then the pandemic hit in 2020 and, locked up inside with a world gone mad, knitting with a gun seemed like the right thing to do.
Artists drawn to the texture and tactility of tufting have now turned it into its own genre, with bold geometry and whimsical abstract styles.
Look at Mirte Van Kooten for example, she runs Studio Mirte in the charming city of Utrecht, Netherlands. Mirte’s background in graphic design gives her tufting creations their own unique visual language.
Image: studiomirte.com
In the heart of Erfurt, Germany, Dirk Rauscher and Corina Müller are the creative minds behind Studio Rosa Rauscher. Their shared passion for tactile art led them to start their own studio to showcase their own multidimensional pieces.
Image: rosarauscher.de
In the city of Bristol, England, Anna Gravelle is a tufting artist who makes magnetic pieces with a dynamic sense of movement. The silky threads in Anna’s work set her apart from the thicker threads commonly found in other artists’ work.
Image: www.annagravelle.com
Across the Atlantic in Asheville, North Carolina, you’ll find Judit Just, aka JuJuJust. Originally from Barcelona, Judit’s background in fashion design and textile art brings vibrant energy to her work, which wouldn’t look out of place swaying in the currents of a tropical atoll.
Image: www.instagram.com/_jujujust_
Thanks to Ted Ead and amazing artists like these, tufting has evolved from folk art to a legitimate contemporary art movement.
If you’re keen to try it out, tufting studios running workshops are popping up everywhere. In Tokyo, check out SAROTOBU, KEKE, and MOKO. Domestika offers online courses too, if you’re still living out a hermetic existence.
For the Ghoul project, I’m about to set out on my own tufting adventure. Keep an eye on my Instagram as I begin to produce the next collection of furry little rug monsters.
Tufting gun image: kekerug.shop/
