The medium is the message, but sorry Marshall McLuhan this article is not going to be about mass media.
This article is about London Kaye, a street artist whose medium of choice is probably the same as your grandmothers- yarn. Kaye is the artist behind “yarn bombing”, a variation on traditional guerrilla-style street art that utilizes a very untraditional medium. Instead of stenciled graffiti or wheat pasted poster art, Kaye crochets large-scale instillations entirely by hand. Typically dismissed as women’s work or fad, crotchet in Kaye’s hands is an enterprise ranging in application from commercial usage to pop-culture commentary. Whereas traditional street artists have very little business success- with the exception of Banksy, who is perhaps the most famous street artist of our time- Kaye has managed to turn what is widely considered a pastime into a lucrative career. In 2014 Kaye caught the eye of a Starbucks store designer who passed by a series of Nutcracker dancers she had strung up on a fence, and promptly hired Kaye to do a display for the companies Brooklyn store. From there Kaye's instillations grew both in size and value, designing a Times Square billboard in 2015 which landed her a commercial with Gap later that year. Kaye exemplifies a rare unity between two poles by being successful in the typical male-focused world of street art, and doing so by using a medium that is traditionally been heralded as a women’s craft.
Crotchet may still retain its connotation's of old women and poorly knit scarves, but for yarn-bombers such as Kaye it’s the unique opportunity to fuse artistic expression with a wearable commodity. Yarn is a medium that combines versatility and function with aesthetic commentary. The beauty of yarn bombing, beyond the fact that it truly is beautiful, is that at its core crotchet is about connection. Yarn is not a medium that needs to be morphed or chiseled, yarn is used to veil and protect. Yarn adds a new twist on a pre-existing scene rather then changing it in some permanent way, making it a wonderfully complicated and whimsical form.
