Cartoon Family Group of Three — Knitted Sculpture, Reykjavík

Reykjavík’s winter market runs outdoors for six weeks and the stallholders wanted something at the entrance that said the market was theirs rather than the city’s. What they specified was not a material or a subject. It was a garment.

The brief, essentially

A family of three at the market entrance, about 2 m, cartoon proportions, everyone wearing a lopapeysa — the Icelandic yoked jumper. Not holding one, not draped over a shoulder. Wearing it.

Getting a knit right

A knitted object has a specific structure: courses and wales, the horizontal and vertical lines of the stitches, and the way a pattern is bounded by those lines. The yoke pattern on this piece is a real one, taken from a jumper the association lent us, and it is laid out across the shoulders in the eight bands it would really have.

The stitch texture is modelled, not painted: roughly 90,000 individual stitch shapes across the three figures, each about 40 mm wide at this scale, slightly irregular because a hand-knitted stitch is never quite even. The three figures have different stitch counts, because the child’s jumper is knit at the same gauge as the adults’, which is exactly what happens in a real family.

The cuffs and the collars

Ribbing is the detail that makes the whole illusion hold. Every wrist, every ankle and every collar is finished in a band of raised alternating vertical ridges with a slightly tighter, softer profile than the body stitch. Without it, the piece reads as a decorated object; with it, it reads as clothing.

At the market

It stands at the entrance to the square through the six weeks of the market and is stored indoors for the rest of the year, which the association organised before we had finished making it. Three local knitters have independently identified the yoke pattern, which the association considers the highest available form of review.