Jewellery designer and artist Mora Dimmerman employs knitting and crochet
techniques in both her jewellery designs in precious metals and in her artworks. The
exhibition Architecture of contact at the Periscope Gallery presents three series of
works exploring the delicate connections between raw materials such as thread, stones,
cardboard, knitting needles and crochet hooks.

The series of body jewellery and the objects series began as Dimerman’s final project for
her Master’s Degree at the Shenkar College of Engineering, Design, and Art. Delicate, dense sculptural crochet surrounds stones in a constructive process animating the thread and charging it with a double role as material creating pattern as well as forming the connection between the stones. The unprocessed stones selected for the piece has no outstanding qualities, but remain as they were when collected, without any drilling, polishing or faceting. They are placed close or far from each other, with the
crocheted or knitted element enveloping, revealing, linking, and covering them while
maintaining the wholeness of each stone, facilitating the connections and relationships
between the stones together and separately, and between the stones and the
environment.

The series “Sketches” is composed of knit pieces created on 2 mm. needles remaining
at the end of the process as a part of the series “From object to drawing.” Each work in
the series is a knitted drawing, be it a “Stretcher,” “Flag,” “Tunnel,” “Path,” and other
names of works, all of them concepts loaded with unique meaning in the context of life
in Israel. The threads and the technique act as a dry connection, bringing and adjoining
elements to create contact forming a structure. The encounter is temporary, since the
structure may be dismantled, like unravelling a knit fabric, and the thread can return to
its original state.

 

All of the crocheted and knitted works use a uniform, sand-coloured thread, which erases
the shade of the stones, while in other pieces black thread is used to emphasize the
light-coloured tones of the stones. Dimerman also uses torn pieces of grey cardboard as
a platform to connect the stones and the thread, while in other artworks using only
thread; the encounters bring to mind the presence of an absent stone. The structure of
the knitted/crocheted stitches created by the needle, orderly at times and densely
crowded at others, or airy, enable Dimerman to create tones and different appearances
for the contact with the stones.

The stone is Dimerman’s symbol for home. During the last intifada when she began the project, the image of the stone became suffused with danger and injury. The ensuing dichotomy and the desire to bridge the two worlds and political conflicts were the inceptions for the project. Using stones and keeping them whole enabled the artist to focus on a non-hierarchical encounter. It is not a state of the strong vs. the weak, but contact facilitating a dynamic dialogue of equilibrium and mutuality.

 

 

Photograph: Achikam Ben-Yosef