ANCESTRAL HUES
The lives of my forefathers

This work deals with one theme, life, and with ten of its infinite possible variations: the lives of my forefathers, visualised here as colour arrays.

I have a family tree going back to the early 16th century. When searching for the dates of my ancestors, I discovered that the exact dates of birth and death are known for ten generations. To be clear: Only of the forefathers – of their wives there is often no more left than a name, if at all.

For this work, I used a yarn available in 100 different shades, i.e. as many shades as there are years in a century. I assigned each shade a number between 00 and 99 as follows: 00-09: whites, 10-19: purples, 20-29: browns, 30-39: reds, 40-49: oranges, 50-59: yellows, 60-69: greens, 70-79: turquoises, 80-89: blues, 90-99: blacks.

The colour arrays are a combination of the collected data and the assigned numbers: Each year lived by the forefathers is represented by the shade with the same number. For example the number 52 is assigned to neon yellow. Which means that everyone who lived in the year 52 in their respective century has neon yellow included in their colour array.

The number of stitches per year, and thus per colour, is fixed in advance and remains constant throughout. The number of different shades per colour array, on the other hand, depends on the length of the respective life. Therefore, the longer the life, the greater the colour diversity and the larger the stitched area.

The resulting colour array gives each life its own overall hue. Each hue is a glimpse into the past. No one alive can know their own hue.

(Embroidered acrylic yarn on my grandmothers’ handwoven dowry linen, 10 works from 43 x 37 cm to 46 x 41 cm, embroideries from 25 x 12 cm to 25 x 20 cm, 2022)

https://ruth-thomas.net/ah
#ancestralhues

AU FIL DU TEMPS
My 2020 visual movement diary

AU FIL DU TEMPS, meaning ‘in the course of time’, or literally: ‘in the thread of time’.

For a whole year I kept track of my movements outside my permanent or occasional temporary residence and transferred the resulting daily patterns to paper. Due to the Covid restrictions introduced in March that year, I travelled very little and my movements mainly took place in the vicinity of my home.

Scale doesn’t matter in these motion patterns. What matters is the overall picture created by each day’s dynamics, be they chosen by me or imposed by external factors. Each day has its very own pattern. And each day is connected to the others, as the French expression so aptly and visually puts it, by the thread of time.

(Machine-sewn thread on paper, 366 works, each 12.7 x 7.6 cm, 2021)

https://ruth-thomas.net/afdt
#aufildutemps

MESH OF LIFE
The lives of my family

This body of work is a further development of my previous work ‘The Days of my Life’.

It features a knitted visualisation of the lives of four generations: my grand-parents’, my parents’, mine and my children’s (from left to right, arranged by year of birth).

One knitted stitch corresponds to one day of life. Some lives have come to an end and their life shapes are completed, some haven’t and the lifeline-like thread is still attached to the knitwork.

To look at this work is to look back in time: Each stitch is a day gone by. The past materialises as texture; the intangible notion of time is transformed into a palpable surface.

Every life has its own individual shape and pattern. The days of a life are all loosely interconnected and mutually dependent, forming an inextricable mesh of intertwined time.

The picture here shows the status of the work in March 2021.

(Knitted metallised yarn, 9 works from 15 x 31 cm to 117 x 31 cm, 2021, partially ongoing)

https://ruth-thomas.net/mol
#meshoflife

KNITTED TIME
The first 500 days of life

These two knitworks illustrate the awake/asleep rhythm during the first 500 days in the lives of my two children. Each knitwork pertains to one child. Awake times are in yellow, sleep times in blue. One stitch represents ten minutes, one row represents one day.

Here, a rhythm of life that usually just happens without leaving any palpable traces is given a concrete form; intangible time is transformed into a tangible surface. This visualisation of time produces a distinct pattern for each child (just as it would produce a very individual pattern for each of us).

This project has been a very long-lasting one: I started to collect the data over eighteen years ago. I spent two 500-day periods manually recording the data, then let the project rest for many years. Only now that my children are adults, have I finally completed it.

(Knitted mohair wool, 2 works, each ca. 87 x 43 cm, frames 100 x 50 cm, 2020)

https://ruth-thomas.net/kt
#knittedtime

THE PATTERN OF LANGUAGE (1/3)
The 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 8689 pixels

This work shows the 30 articles of the UDHR. Each letter and each punctuation mark is replaced by a colour; the spaces are kept in neutral silver-grey. Moreover, the silver-grey yarn forms the basic structure of the whole work.

The resulting work represents the fundamental rights of every human being, but also an abstract colour pattern: the pattern of the English language, which would be largely the same for any other source text, apart from the order of the colours.

The loose ends of wool on the back are a random by-product of the crochet technique used. However, due to their idiosyncratic colour and formal dynamics, they represent an equivalent counterpart to the organised front.

(Crocheted cotton, wool and acrylic yarns, 105 x 97 cm, 2019)

https://ruth-thomas.net/pol
#thepatternoflanguage

#unitednations
#udhr
#universaldeclarationofhumanrights

Me knitting the days of my life.

https://ruth-thomas.net/doml
#thedaysofmylife

#textileart #conceptualart #conceptualtextileart #contemporaryart #contemporarytextileart

‘EUROPEANS’
(The European Parliament from 1979 to 2014)
Knitwork, 2018

https://ruth-thomas.net/eu
#europeans

#textileart #conceptualart #conceptualtextileart #contemporaryart #contemporarytextileart #euparliament #europeanparliament