This Is 'Not A Cardie'

Soft Machine Mixed Media Installation

This short looping animation is part of Not A Cardie, an experimental moving‑image installation combining textile art, domestic craft, and screen‑based media. Filmed with the Cambridge Six Bells Knitting Group, the work layers their repetitive knitting gestures onto old computer monitors housed within a large, tea‑cosy‑like knitted structure. The installation continues to grow as an evolving collection of materials — media players, PC monitors, inflatables, and an expanding pile of knitted objects including jumpers, scarves, cardigans, baby booties, and pom poms. The project has also extended into the surrounding space, with knitted coverings wrapped around a sofa, a lampshade, and lighting.

First developed in Cambridge, UK, Not A Cardie has been exhibited across festivals and gallery spaces, adapting to each site as a hybrid ecosystem of soft sculpture and digital moving image. The soundscape, drawn from the 1951 satirical sci‑fi film The Man in the White Suit, introduces an uncanny contrast between handmade domestic craft and industrial modernity, linking the handmade and domestic to the industrial, where it becomes an awkward futuristic growth. The work explores themes of repetition, labour, and the blurring of boundaries between the digital and the physical, the handmade and the mass-produced, the domestic and the industrial. It invites viewers into a liminal space where the familiar is rendered strange, evoking a sense of eerie nostalgia and playful absurdity.