Hosiery Abstracts

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Katie Schwab
17 September - 5 November 2022

Katie Schwab is a maker who works with installation, textiles, print and video to explore histories of craft, design and education. Her interests focus on domestic spaces, civic architecture and play environments. Katie's projects are often hands-on, combining community workshops, oral history interviews, archive visits and skills-sharing. Katie lives and works in London.

'Hosiery Abstracts' is the final exhibition in the 'Archive Fever' programme, a project about collecting and collections hosted by Modern Painters, New Decorators, funded by Arts Council England and produced in partnership with Leicestershire Museums Collection. Artists Joanne Masding, Jagjit Kaur, Dan Cowlam, and Katie Schwab have made new artwork in response to the historical items held in the Leicestershire Museums Collection.

For this project, Katie immersed herself in local histories of machine knitting, visiting the Leicestershire Collection, Charnwood Museum and the Framework Knitters Museum. Katie examined knitted samples, garments and technical drawings to learn more about the wool trade, hosiery production and the knitting industry. Katie also attended a machine knitting course, learning techniques that have inspired new knitted artworks and a wall-based work. Katie has a family connection to the Leicestershire textiles industry. Her German Jewish great-grandfather emigrated to Leicester during WWII, where he worked for Midland Hosiery Mills Ltd, a present-day sock manufacturer.

LU Arts at Loughborough University has also commissioned Katie to produce a new public artwork on campus. As part of the Handicrafts Residency, Katie has been meeting makers and visiting local museums to look at different tools and techniques of production, from 19th-century Framework Knitting to modern punchcard-operated machines. Her commission will bring these interests together in a knitted wall-based artwork produced collaboratively with Loughborough University textiles students.