The Knitting Machine

In a modern artist’s take on patriotism, Dave Cole, a self-described hyperactive sculptor from Providence, RI, spent the weekend knitting an American flag... a really big American flag.

“I’ll be up on a boom lift, throwing the stitches with a 5-foot-long fishing gaff,” Cole reports. “There will be a guy in each excavator, and I'll give hand signals to them: Angle it up, lower it down. A lot of it is just plain fun: Just boys playing with trucks.”

“It’s something a girl could do, in every way a boy could want to do it,” Cole says of “The Knitting Machine.” “It’s bigger, louder, faster, heavier, and more dangerous.“ But that’s not the point, he says. “Dig deeper, and you get to the idea of work, and of identity in work and production, and how work and production relate to the machine, and how the machine relates to national identity.”

The project uses two John Deere excavators holding two aluminum light poles to knit 18-inch-wide strips of felt into a flag 20-feet-wide by 30-feet-long. The work was completed yesterday afternoon, but the flag will be displayed at Mass MoCA until October.

Via Cool Hunting. Quotes above from The Boston Globe.