“I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like pasta,” says artist and knitter Kate Jenkins. She’s spent nearly a year crafting Knitalia, a highly labour-intensive tribute to one of the world’s great culinary traditions. “Italian food culture is just so captivating,” she tells Broadsheet. “It’s got this mass appeal, but it’s so cool at the same time.”
Still, though loving pasta is pretty universal, Knitalia is something that could only emerge from Jenkins’s own creative mind.
Delicate strands of spaghetti tangle onto china plates. A sardine seems to leap out of its can, glimmering with tiny silver sequins. A cocoa-drenched tiramisu begs you to stick a fork in – until you remember that each speck of chocolate dusting the plate is a tiny snippet of mouth-drying wool.
These artworks sit in a whole immersive restaurant in Soho’s Air Contemporary gallery, complete with custom tiles by London-based studio Balineum, and real tables and chairs sourced by vintage furniture dealer Merchant & Found.
“This show is kind of a massive deal for me,” Jenkins says, “because it’s using the skills and techniques I’ve developed over the years and putting them all together.”
Jenkins’s practice began two decades ago, when she made woollen food to advertise her fledgling knitwear brand. The appetite for these works was instant. Now, her back catalogue lists brand collabs as varied as Royal Mail, Mini Boden and Panzer’s beigels, and she spent her spring horsing around creating equestrian-themed windows for Hermes on New Bond Street, with braided mane hairstyles and a tempting carrot chandelier.
“I’m always looking for ways to shoehorn a joke into my work,” says Jenkins, who’s filled Knitalia with cheeky flourishes like a sumo wrestler mozzarella ball, or a bottle of “pinot stitchio”.
Jenkins’s approach might be playful, but serious effort goes into making every item perfect. “My aim is to elevate knitted and crocheted textiles, and to make them appreciated as an art … it takes maybe three hours to make one grissini stick,” she says. “You can’t rush anything, it all has to be lovingly made. I’ve got an obsessive attention to detail, and it has to look perfect in my eyes. Some items take days to make.”
Jenkins works from life, bringing each Italian dish into her Brighton studio for careful study. “I don't actually eat meat, but even so I had to force myself to go out and buy salami and cut it so I could get exactly the right shade,” she explains, gesturing to an immaculate shelf behind her, filled with every possible colour of yarn, wound onto old school wooden spools.
Her research for the installation began at Lina Stores on Brewer Street, before she visited Puglia, Crotone, Naples and Venice. “It’s like a diary of all these lovely things I’d eaten and drunk over the time I was doing all my research,” she says.
She also found inspiration much, much closer to home. “My partner is Italian … I always used to joke with him and say, ‘Oh, pizza is just cheese on toast,’ which is obviously like swearing to an Italian. But now I’ve been coming to him for advice!”
Kate’s Knitalian will run at Air Contemporary, 4 Ham Yard, W1D 7LT from November 1 to December 5.
