Kate Just

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1974, Kate Just is a feminist artist who uses knitting and other textile traditions as a form of social and community practice – art that reflects and is part of everyday life. Although trained as a painter, having studied at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne where she continues to work today as a senior lecturer, Just picked up knitting shortly after a personal tragedy. In 2000, her brother suddenly died. Upon briefly returning to America for the funeral, Just witnessed her mother doing two things she had never seen her do before: smoking and knitting.[1] “All my work since then has been about family, love, intimacy, loss. It has been about women using their own language – material language, artistic language and familial language.”[2]

Protest Signs (2021-22) is a suite of knitted placards and ‘paintings’ made in homage to real images of protest trawled from the internet, social media, news media or from Just’s own photographs taken in attendance of real events. The ‘craftivism’ of the series, where handcrafts meet activism, is witnessed not only in the images selected–the political retorts drawn on cardboard or spanning handmade banners are aesthetic acts unto themselves–but also Just’s translation into yarn. For Just, knitting objects that are ‘usually ephemeral, dynamic, funny, made by everyday people with at hand material, and discarded after use’,[3] reprises the momentary political groundswells captured by the slogans, and is a reprisal of a tradition of crafting that has been historically overlooked by the Western art canon.

I Can’t Believe I Still Have to Protest this Shit (2021) captures this reprisal and revision most poignantly. Images of the pithy placard statement were widely circulated soon after the 2017 Women’s March, an event originating in Washington DC but staged globally across 81 countries, including Australia. The rally was held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 45th president of the United States of America and constituted the single largest protest in US history at the time (this title was later eclipsed by the Black Lives Matter protests, sparked by the death of George Floyd, in 2020). The Women’s March was spurred by Trump’s documented history of misogyny and sexual violence, and policies against women’s reproductive rights, which has since resulted in the historic overturn of Roe v Wade – a legal case enshrining the US constitutional right to abortion.

The 2017 Women’s March was marked by its own act of craftivism. The Pussyhat Project, first initiated by Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman, saw millions of protestors donning a DIY knitted, sewn or crocheted pink hat, replete with cat ears. The handmade object was an icon of solidarity and unity across time and place, and was a counter-emblem to the MAGA hat – a red and white baseball cap branded with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign slogan ‘Make America Great Again’. I Can’t Believe I Still Have to Protest this Shit draws out this embedded history of ‘make do’, the ways in which crafting attends or is central to significant political events and the aesthetics of the collective act. But, the bittersweet sentiment also speaks to the cyclical, historical necessity for protest:

I hope that people can see the knitting and the time and labour put into the work as a form of love. Like a love letter to the world that suggests that through this action it’s possible to imagine a different world.[4]