Grandma's House
A giant knitted house that visitors can step into at Parr Hall is to become one of the showstoppers at this year’s Warrington Arts Festival.
Chapelford artist Marie Jones has spent more than six months painstakingly creating a life-sized replica of her grandmother’s home in Great Sankey after a year of intense planning.
Made entirely from neon green and white acrylic yarn and held up by a frame, the 7m-tall ‘Grandma’s House’ will float down from the rigging at Parr Hall for a vivid exploration of home, memory and family bonds.
Opening on Sunday, 20 July, and running for a week until 26 July, the immersive experience will give people the chance to walk through the front door and enter the rooms most used by Marie’s grandma, Margaret Robinson.
From the brickwork outside to the furniture and items around the interior, every detail of the house is in the process of being meticulously recreated using digitally hacked Brother KH950i knitting machines.
The knitted house symbolises not only an act of devotion and labour but a material reflection of the quiet spectacle of domestic life.
For Marie, it is also manifestation of her relationship with her grandma Margaret, who is now 86. Since she was about four years old, the house has been a constant presence in her life – a place of love and comfort as well as a growing patchwork of memories.
The installation captures a moment in time too with the acknowledgement that the places we hold dear are temporary. One day, Grandma’s House will belong to another family.
In that sense, Marie hopes visitors will bring their own experiences, associations and interpretations to the installation to think about what ‘home’ means to them.
It’s a very personal project but also a very ambitious one – so to make it possible Marie was assisted by 113 people at a series of workshops at Warrington Museum.
From knitting enthusiasts to beginners, who fancied trying something new, the community rallied around with the age of volunteers ranging from two to 80-plus. They will all be given special thanks for their contribution at a launch event in July.
By the end of the project, altogether Marie will have used the lion’s share of a 150kg bulk load of yarn which is 765,000m – or 475 miles – long. To put that into perspective, that is more than the distance between Warrington and Land’s End.
Though Grandma’s House is built to scale, its grid-like surface of pixels translated into stitches distorts reality. The effect mirrors memory: up close, the image disappears into abstraction. It is only with distance that the house comes into focus.