Artist: Annie Shead

9,983 rows of yarn, threaded and stretched, looped and looping. Woollen lines extend and turn, carrying with them excitement and curiosity. Warm, earthy, often timeworn colours dance at angles, butting one another at seams of heroic irregularity. Here, at these borders, knitting becomes other.

Brazenly, Annie Shead says these are paintings, and more specifically ‘Machine Paintings’. Made with the aid of a late '70s knitting machine, through the countless needles of which yarn is threaded, each of Shead’s paintings makes headway in the history of art because, unlike in painting (by which I here mean artworks made using paint), the recognised lineage of knitting in art is far shorter. Because of this, Shead is exposing the absurdity of art-making: she is not standing on the shoulders of predecessors, harvesting from their success a credibility of her own; while knitting has long been understood in a domestic realm, with connotations of practicality and sentimentality, it has infrequently penetrated into an art context.

Charged with discourse on craft, gender, and class, Shead’s Machine Paintings transform what is otherwise private and domestic into the public. They harbour painterly qualities in abundance: seams and knots and never-quite-perpendicular lines provide passages of happenstance and ‘mistake’ - constant reminders to see and understand the medium in its environment.

The vocabulary is minimalistic, relying heavily on the strength and symbolism of colour and form to convey sentiment. Abstract and often pattern-based, these paintings are born not only from the study of painting and graphic design, but from a repetitive and ritualistic process in which yarn meets labour meets art. The result is a transformation of knitting into painting, of past into present, and of ordinary into discretely extraordinary.

Annie Shead (b.2002) is a painter and sculptor who in 2025 graduated from Camberwell College of Arts. Solo exhibitions include 9,983 Rows, FreddieFoulkes Gallery, London (2026), Group exhibitions include Annie Shead and William Van Hoorn, Antonia Jannone, Milan (2026), Beyond Form, Rabbet Gallery, London (2024).