Abstract
Please Leave on the Seat After Use explores my evolving relationship with the Seiki Shima knitting machine, which I have positioned as a key contributor to my research practice. Materializing personal narratives through textile explorations, I have come to understand that the rich, archival properties of textiles are activated through their engagement with people and the everyday spaces they occupy. Textiles embody personal and culturally conditioned behaviours, they respond to their environment - capturing and releasing stories.
This autoethnographic study investigates machine crafted textiles as responsive artefacts. In my project I have used machine knitting to examine notions of the pictorial, which I have described as default canvases and materials as archives, which I have classified as skinships. My approach to textile design is conveyed through my subversion of the traditions associated with hand and machine-made knits.
