Crafts and tech don't go well together, or do they? Channing Hansen proves us wrong with his crafts & computational art.
Born in 1972 in Los Angeles, Hansen creates hand-knitted textiles that then he mounts on wooden canvases. Hansen paints with yarns, creating abstract configurations on delicate web-like backgrounds.
Quite often his palette is composed of bold colours highlighting abstract configurations on canvases. The process is time-consuming, not just because these pieces are hand-made but because of the preparation that goes on behind the scenes: Hansen buys indeed the raw fleece of conservation-bred sheep; he washes it and proceeds to card it. He then passes onto the other stages - dyeing, blending and spinning the wool.
You may think his work could therefore be filed under the "textile art" category since it has a strong craft component, but there's tech behind these pieces: Hansen's work is indeed predetermined by an elaborate computer algorithm.
Hansen adds the variables - dimensions, motifs slanted to the left or right, length and width, colours, patterns - and the algorithm generates potentially infinite combinations of colours, fibers and patterns. Hansen relies on the algorithm and does not know how the finished work will look like until it is complete.
The result is visually striking, especially when Hansen puts his smaller canvases one next to the other, creating compositions of tiles that look like the image grids made by DALL-E mini.
Analyse Hansen composition's one next to the other and you will note varying degrees of complexity, from dense to looser stitches that reveal the structure of the canvas behind the yarns, a way to open a portal on different dimensions like Lucio Fontana's slashed canvases.
There are some components of maths and physics in the designs with the ongoing series entitled "Quantum Paintings" (2012– ), featuring textiles stretched to their limits, but also shapes and forms that look inspired by nature and biology. You may spot a spider web here, a tentacle there, and maybe a mysterious shape of something vaguely resembling bacteria on a petri dish, yet everything remains firmly in the abstract realm, with a healthy dose of order (camouflaged as chaos) injected by the algorithm.
Crafts and computation combine therefore in the works of this artist who actually turned to knitting over ten years ago not to create textile art, but to find a way to relax and put his restless mind at rest. When he realized knitting could have opened for him the door to another universe, he went to great lengths and even joined the Greater Los Angeles Spinning Guild, going back to the roots to learn as much as possible about natural fibers. Since then he has worked with silk, alpaca, mohair, and wool, sometimes adding in his work also holographic polymer threads.
The intriguing thing about Hansen's work is that his pieces look as if they were made by an artist passionate about crafts and experimenting with yarns in a casual and random way, yet behind this art there is a technological research, that proves that technology with handmade techniques can produce innovative works of art.
Hansen's works are included in a number of prominent international collections (LACMA in Los Angeles, the Art Institute of Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among the others), but you can bet that, in future, we will see this artist involved in some fashion collaboration maybe with a knitwear designer or creating knitted backgrounds for runway shows.
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