I throughly enjoyed creating the blanket for the offsite show, to me when I knit it makes me feel relaxed and allows me to let out my personal experiences to do with my epileptic condition. I chose to use these colours because I wanted to show how certain colours such as red- creates a sense of pain and restriction, yellow- which represents happens if I haven’t had a seizure, black- representing tension and the blankness I face when I become unconscious. I feel that when I make things hand made it allows me to show my sense of authenticity and organic factors within my work. I was very inspired by Tracy Emin because she includes her personal experiences within her work by hand- making things such as the bed she created using a range of different materials to show the idea of emotions and thoughts going on within her mind. I believe that this artist was relevant to my work because I feel that there is a comparison between her work and mine because we both use different processes, methods and techniques to represent our ideas of how we see our personal experiences creating it through hand made materials and see how they interlink, compare and contrast with one another.
I managed to complete this idea- working for 6 hours straight with breaks until 12am for 6 weeks straight doing intense knitting. It was very tiring doing this blanket but I managed to pull it off. I also decided to use fabrics and hand stitched handwritten poems from my personal experiences of my epileptic seizures. Firstly I would use a permanent marker pens to outline where exactly I wanted the words to be and then would hand stitch them using both bright and darker threads to point out the emotions of pain, isolated, imprisonment and destruction due to the way how the epileptic condition I have restricts me from doing certain things. In a way it affects my personality and the way how I react to people, sometimes I don’t intend to be miserable sometimes but, if I have a seizure like the absent ones I just want to be left alone until I feel ready to talk
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