Our 'COWCH'

ARTIST STATEMENT

This represents a COWCH, like the one that may be at your Grandma's house.

In our research, we discovered that in the early days of European settlement of Australia, many women learned to knit. The women sat cozily on their COWCHes, their work illuminated by a nearby lamp, and knitted. In many homes, this tradition has continued to today, and is represented in our design.

This side has been painted to look like varnished wood grain, in keeping with the home-style aesthetic of country Australia.

The eye has a square pupil, like a sheep, with the school logo in it

We made the head into a French knitting dolly and put a step-by-step guide on the neck to make our design fully interactive. 

The spare wool is kept in a basket that has been woven using traditional Indigenous weaving techniques to pay our respects to our community. 

The basket sits on our latch hooked grass, which is various shades of green and brown to represent the different grazing areas sheep are kept - from really dry, dusty climates to lush green pastures.

You can sit on the COWCH, which has been made by stitching together all of the squares that we knitted. We chose shades of blue to represent our school colours. The cushion is a visual reminder to us all that biosecurity is everyone’s responsibility.

The lamp has been knit bombed; this is a really popular form of street art and can be seen around Sydney.

The bookshelf was added to be educational for the audience.  Information on the wool industry, knitting and biosecurity can be found here. It can also be used to project our movie.

This side represents the future uses of wool in space. Through our research we found out the NASA uses merino wool in space for its many unique properties such as flame resistance, breathability, and light weight. So we decided to make this side a bit fun and represent space through the use of the galaxy background!

The space sheep 'Come in Fleece', inspired by Star Wars lettering, further contributing to the space theme on this side.

The face of the design is a robotic cow with a red mosaic eye to give it a cyborg feel, furthering the science-fiction aesthetic. We have also added a real ear tag that we sourced from a farmer and a QR reader to link the audience to our YouTube movie.

The grandma knitting on the COWCH provides a structural link between the two thematic elements of the wool industry that we are communicating.

We put mirror mosaic on the udder is a subtle recurrence of Matraville’s previous Archibull submissions.

We added sheep to the back of the COWCH as if piloting a space vessel and others floating around for fun, continuing with the idea of merino wool in space and adding a bit of quirky interest for the audience.

Lastly, the swirl patterns on the floor evoke those of Van Gogh's 'Starry Night' artwork, which pwools together our space theme.