Paper Street Architecture: URBAN INTERVENTIONS

The knitting graffiti phenomenon achieved international notoriety in the latter-half of the noughties, spear-headed by an aptly-named art group from Houston, Texas known simply as 'Knitta'. By 2009 the movement had well and truly arrived in Sydney and knitted urban interventions began attracting the attention of tabloids, broadsheets, blogs and councils alike. A relic of this (not-too-distant) bygone era may be found, though faded by the sun and worn at the seams, on Crown Street in Darlinghurst. For want of a better description it is a painstakingly stitched Tree Blanket in various shades of wool, conspicuously concealing the fork of a street-side tree. An intervention of this order achieves so much with so little. It speaks of feminist theory, of the resurrection and reinterpretation of traditional handcrafts, of grassroots movements, and of globalisation and the exploitation of the Internet as a means of spreading what may have started as a small-scale artistic prank in Houston, to Sydney and Copenhagen and beyond. It conspicuously sheds light on all that it conceals, transforming a generic, though nonetheless delightful tree into a beacon for philosophical, artistic and social discourse.