Artist Allyce Wood creates textiles using a series of methods and tools with a focus on coded processes. Daylights is an installation of intricately patterned textile panels, shifting color and design as they stretch upwards. Using a domestic knitting machine, a tool used in the 60’s and 70’s for garment making at home, Wood created a series of punch cards which were fed through the machine to create repeated two-color designs. Each panel is made up of rows of tiny individual stitches. The artist pushes and pulls a carriage laced with yarn across the machine’s bed of two hundred needles, which reach out to grab the yarns as they are carried over. This action is repeated between seven hundred and a thousand times to create each piece of the installation.

The panels are composed of images of friends, flowers, and suns, rising mists and playful beasts, the pixelated symbols based on the artist's own designs and medieval tapestry. All these icons and effects give a sense of shifting days, of the past and the present coming together, a new system of symbols creating a language of warmth and abundance. Within the contexts of the soft, familiar material of the yarns, Daylights aims to create a welcoming sense of positive horizons.

This installation was shown through Shunpike Storefronts on the corner of Harrison Street and Boren Avenue North in South Lake Union, Seattle from October 2022 - January 2023.

For more information about Shunpike’s Storefront Program, follow this link.