She quotes Virginia Woolf’s classic feminist novel A Room of One’s Own, which explores the notion that inside every women is the potential to create art, when allowed to flourish. This special talent wasn't unique to Walker's mother, though - according to Walker, every women is an artist. She even implies it alleviated the hardship they had to endure: "Whatever she planted grew as if by magic … because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms - sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spinea, delphiniums, verbenas". This garden instilled in Walker a love of beauty and art that transcended their poverty. Like a painter, her mother ‘adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in…she planted ambitious gardens - and still does - with over fifty different varieties of plants that bloom profusely from early March until late November’. Walker asks when he ‘overworked mother’ had time to ‘know or care about feeding the creative spirit', and challenges conventional ideas of who can be an artist, saying: "The artist that was and is my mother showed itself to me only after many years." Walker raises fundamental questions about what it is to be an artist - many of these women were anonymous and would have never considered themselved to be artists - and concludes that her mother’s art was her garden, describing a type of woman who ‘left her mark in the only materials she could afford, and in the only condition her position in society allowed her to use’. In her 1974 essay In Search Of Our Mother’s Gardens, the African-American novelist Alice Walker uses an evocative description of her mother's garden to explain how African-American women of her mother and grandmother’s generations, who were denied a basic education because of the legacy of slavery and segregation, and were therefore often unable to even read or write, expressed their creativity in the only ways they could, often conventional crafts. Knitted Nature is so striking because it uses the imagery of nature that’s all around us and recreates it in an art form that is so often practical and useful - so conventional and accessible. It stands out as a reminder of the beauty that’s in the everyday around us, both in nature and in traditional crafts like knitting. Knitted Nature, and an accompanying tree adorned with knitted Valencia oranges in Broadfield Park across the road, is an installation by the Manchester knitting duo ArtYarn who invited knitters across the world to knit a leaf or flower and send it to be part of their indoor garden. Bluebells and poppies are easily identifiable, and other flowers are plaited, clumped in clusters, coiled like roses and balls of colour. A starburst flower is like a giant sun, a lacy, frayed flower looks indistuingishable from the real thing, whilst also resembling la sea sponge or anemone. It’s like nature magnified, complete with perching bumblebees. Others are more obviously stylised, with buttons for centres. The flowers are cartoonishly real - gaps are knitted into the pattern where the veins of the leaves would be, thread winds through the blooms like filaments, tiny clear beads glisten like a trail of dew and silvery embroidery trails across leaves. It's sort of a pop art take on flowers, remade in wool, shiny, fluffy and multicoloured. When you get closer, you realise it's knitting, but not as you've seen it before. It's more alive, somehow, than any of the other works in the room. This artwork almost dances through the air, fragile tendrils twisting against the pane of glass in the door. It appears to be a window box or plant pot on the floor, from which are climbing tens of flowers in every colour you can think of, with reds and fluorescent yellows and oranges leaping out. Your eye, however, is drawn to something incongruous, over by the door.
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