Power And Protest

"I've been knitting garments for my practice since before I even knew it was my practice,” painter Ellen Lesperance tells me. We're talking about her initial forays into textile work, and I note that such observations are common among artists—especially women—who learn craft skills early and informally. As someone who learned to sew the same way, I’m not surprised when she goes on to explain that her grandmother taught her how to knit when she was a child. 

In contrast, the years of her formal art education began at the University of Washington, in a painting program taught almost entirely by male faculty where the emphasis was on traditional figure painting. After receiving her BFA degree, Lesperance got a job driving a Seattle Metro bus, and began to knit garments to wear under her uniform to keep her warm, but also to afford a kind of talismanic protection. "I was knitting power objects,” she recalls, “but I didn't have language for it yet."  

Lesperance and I are talking under the slanted roof of her cozy backyard studio, a humble space for a Guggenheim Fellow whose work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Art and Design, and the Kadist Art Foundation. Hearing Lesperance review her early years, it strikes me as possible that she could have ended up on another path if her talents had gone unacknowledged; however, she was fortunate to encounter Hanneline Røgeberg, a professor at UW. When Røgeberg moved to New Jersey to teach at Rutgers, she encouraged Lesperance to apply to the MFA program there with the garments she had knit for her bus-driver job. At Rutgers, Lesperance studied under feminist artists like Joan Semmel, Judith Brodsky, and Martha Rosler. Rethinking her practice within this explicitly feminist framework, Lesperance began to realize that the patterns of knitting are a visual code, a system of marks for representing the female body; the quantity and scale of knitting stitches indicates, for example, the curve of a waist, the width of the shoulders, or the length of an arm. Taking this body-based format as a fundamental structure, she began to draw knitting patterns using colored markers on gridded paper. 

While we discuss the development of her practice, I study the walls, which are covered with notes, photos of protests, print-outs of reference material, and layers of work in progress. After graduating with her MFA in 1999, Lesperance got a job in New York working for Vogue Knitting, proofreading pattern instructions and testing them by knitting items for the magazine. Ultimately, this began to interfere with her practice: "It wasn't self-driven and it wasn't conceptual, it was just copyediting, design, and pragmatics." Eventually, the administrative focus of the job left her with little desire to work in the studio, and she began to look for other opportunities. She accepted a teaching position at the Maine College of Art, and taught there for seven years. Then, in 2007, "my whole world imploded—I quit my job, left my partner, and moved back to the West Coast pregnant and with a two-year-old. I totally started over, in my late thirties with two children." But once back in Seattle, she found she also had a new direction for her practice: "I was thinking about this woman that I met at a commune in New Mexico in 2005; she had talked to me for hours about Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp [an anti-nuke collective in England that operated from 1981 to 2000], which I had never heard of. I started digging into it, ordering self-published books and looking up images." 

The research electrified her practice. "I was thinking about creative direct action, what people make for protests: placards, banners, street theater, and knitwear, and I started to observe the knitwear of the campers. The Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp saw creativity as an antiwar stance—making as the opposite of violence. They repurposed everything, they shared garments; in my research, I've seen different women wearing the same garment, the sweaters were protest objects that got passed around. It makes you think about how labor is valued, where people want to put their creativity and energy." 

Over her years of inquiry, Lesperance has found many of her source images through direct contact with former campers, who have shared their slides and photographs. She uncovers material by digging through various archives: "I go into all of it. I track down films—there are some really amazing woman-made films that came out of the movement—I go through TV programs and make stills or grab a screenshot. There are books and stock photos—I see who took the photo, and I contact them and ask if they have other images. I'm just trolling for images."  

Lesperance has amassed her own considerable archive of images relating to Greenham Common knitwear, to the point where she is now able to put together multiple views of one protest, from various sources. "Sometimes I'll find another image of the same garment, and I'll piece them together, which is thrilling. I finally saw the front of a sweater I'd been tracking for years, and it was just, Oh my God!" 

On the day that we meet, Lesperance is putting the finishing touches on a book to be published in conjunction with her exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art (Velvet Fist, January 26 through June 28, 2020). She hopes the book will help exhibition viewers and pattern enthusiasts understand more about the symbols used in these protests. Ultimately, the book is a didactic tool and a mini-archive on its own, containing snapshots from protests alongside citations that explain the origins of the image and information about the symbols that appear in the image.  

Often, the garments for which she is making patterns can only be seen from one view, so her paintings are exercises in imagination. To translate the photograph of a sweater into a painted pattern, she must conceptualize the entire garment. "I can see the back—is the front a mirror of that? I can't see the sleeves, what might they look like? If the image is black-and-white, what were the original colors?" Once these decisions are made, the paintings are completed with text at the bottom—either drawn from the protest signs held by the campers, or extracted from campers’ unpublished diaries and scrapbooks. In some instances, the text comes from photocopied song books that were circulated among the protestors. "If you watch video footage [of the protesters at Greenham Common]," says Lesperance, "they're constantly singing." 

Given the time frame of the original protests, I ask whether the imagery that she uses in her paintings ever feels dated or outmoded. Referring to her 2019 solo show at Adams and Ollman in Portland, she says, “I wanted to translate old garments in a way that is clearly relevant. A painting that says 'no cruise missiles' can feel antique, so I complicated the text and made it clear how relevant it is. Maybe there was a brief moment when we could imagine that nuclear weapons were not an acute existential threat anymore, but we clearly are not in that state now." For the exhibition, Lesperance focused on one protest sweater in particular that visually mimics the layout and stylistic conventions of a newspaper. She could read a few of the words that were knitted into the sweater, but could not see the whole garment, so while designing the painting based on this sweater, she imagined layers of text that address contemporary issues. STOP WAR, reads one painting. STOP FASCISM, cries another. At the very bottom of one that reads STOP MEN, small marks spell out EVERY SINGLE FUCKING DAY OF MY LIFE. Though the themes in her work are serious, Lesperance isn't afraid to express her exasperation as humor.

As we look through her collection of knitting pattern books from the 1980s, our conversation returns to the idea of so-called women's work: "There's this tension for me between the hyper-rigidity of a pattern—the confines of instruction—versus the interpretation, the creativity in the actual making. It's a very feminized space, between what women are told to do and how they interpret or even disregard those instructions and create a life for themselves, or an artistic practice." This tension also appears in the work, in the oscillation between the historicized, archived past of protests and their present-day counterparts, and between the flat space of the painting and the implied dimensions of the garment (and body) it represents. Calling attention to power and symbolism through the lens of textile tradition positions Lesperance's practice solidly in the lineage of feminist interpretation. Here, "women's work" is a wellspring of advocacy and resistance.  

Bean Gilsdorf's critical writing has been published in Artforum, Frieze, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her artwork is in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and the International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She lives in Portland, Oregon.