Speaker: Kirk Dunn
Topic: Stitched Glass - Love Affair with Knitting and Colorwork
.jpeg)
Kirk Dunn is an actor and writer, but his greatest love is knitting. He has been knitting since 1988 and began designing in 1996. In 1998, Kirk apprenticed at the Kaffe Fassett Studio in England. In 2003, he was awarded a Chalmers Foundation Fellowship for Stitched Glass, an installation of tapestries hand-knit in the style of stained glass, exploring the commonalities and conflicts amongst Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The project took him 15 years to complete. Kirk is now touring Stitched Glass alongside The Knitting Pilgrim, a one-man play he performs about his artistic and spiritual journey knitting the giant project, and his hopes to contribute to the conversation about interfaith empathy, compassion, and understanding of the other.
Join Kirk for an engaging presentation about his love affair with knitting and colorwork and how it led to his knitting Stitched Glass, a triptych of three full-sized (9 ft tall by 5 ft wide) tapestries in the style of stained-glass windows exploring the commonalities and conflicts amongst Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The project—originally scheduled to take 10 months—took him 15 years to complete (imagine how his wife felt about that!). Kirk will talk about how, when there seemed to be no possibilities to show the work, he and his wife Claire wrote him a one-man show, called The Knitting Pilgrim, about his artistic journey—a show which has toured across Canada, Austria and Germany. And he might even tell the story of how, one night, the car was broken into and two tapestries were stolen…and then, mercifully, recovered. Kirk will also share how his love of color has impacted his work designing knitwear, out-of-the-box three-dimensional works of art, and his forays into craftivism.
.png){kind=small}