Kate Just, ANONYMOUS WAS A WOMAN
June 10, 2019 - April 30, 2021
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
Anonymous was a woman is an ongoing art work that involves the repetitive production of hand knitted panels (16 x 16 inch) bearing the text ‘Anonymous was a woman.’ It began on an artist residency at Art Omi in Ghent, New York on June 10, 2019 (my birthday) and continued through April 2021. Stretched around canvas, each differently coloured work resembles a textile plaque. The muted tones of the work refer to a palette of jewels or minerals, natural or long buried treasures. Assembled on the wall in a grid, the works resemble a columbarium or monument to past lives or lost artworks.
The work is inspired by a quotation in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1928). In this feminist polemic, Woolf questions the ways women’s authorship has been judged as inferior to that of men, and systematically made invisible. Woolf says, ‘I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” Over time this quote has been rephrased as ‘Throughout most of history, Anonymous was a woman.’ Through the making of the work, I meditate upon the immeasurable contributions that women have made to culture and society, and mourn the losses sustained by the erasure or exclusion of many of these gifts from the canon of art history.
Each panel is comprised of over 17,000 stitches and 25 hours labour. I continuously produced two panels a week over the course of almost two years, while juggling parenting, family life and a full time job. The work was carried and produced at home, at work (including in teaching spaces and meetings), in public space, on public transportation. People witnessing the making of the work were invited to sit beside me to talk, ask questions, or discuss feminism. These discussions centred on gender, money, the art world, racism, sexuality, mothers, notable and forgotten women throughout history, forms of privilege that still prevail in feminist spaces, and the exclusions within the term woman. This knitting opened up a space to share the small details of life.
The work figures on Instagram at @katejustknits where the progress of the knitted work unfolded. Posts detail the thoughts and ideas behind each panel, updated statistics on the underrepresentation of women in the art world, as well as reflections on feminism and my own life. The work’s positioning within social media posts is both a vehicle for the work and a paradox, as social media spaces often invite distraction, constant scrolling, a loss of productive time, and a movement away from the present embodiment and patience required by crafts such as knitting. Against the odds, the hours in the project simultaneously manifest and make visible the ongoing labour required to sustain an art practice, to overcome barriers to success and to effect forms of social change.
When completed, the project comprised 140 panels and two million stitches. It marks a year and eleven months of my life. When the work was presented in The National curated by Rachel Kent at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney from March - August 2021, I knitted the final twelve panels live. Members of the public were invited to join knitting circles in front of the work as we had collective conversations about our lives and the ideas that emerge in relation to this work.
This work was made possible by funding from the Australia Council from the Arts. A residency at Artspace in Sydney supported my month long knitting circles live at the MCA in April 2021.
-Kate Just
Hear/watch more about this project here: Rachel Parsons interviews Kate Just on What the Art #9; Namila Benson interviews Kate Just on ABC Artworks TV show (CC), Briony Downes interviews Kate Just on Pull Focus (Art Collector) (CC) and curator Rachel Kent (The National 2021 at the MCA) summarises the key ideas in the project Anonymous was a woman.