VIDEO: MEMBERS of the public have a chance to look inside a giant knitted house currently on display inside the Parr Hall until Saturday as part of Warrington Arts Festival.
The giant knitted house is one of the showstoppers at this year’s Warrington Arts Festival, created by Chapelford artist Marie Jones who spent more than six months painstakingly creating the life-sized replica of her grandmother’s home in Great Sankey after a year of intense planning.
Made entirely from neon green and white acrylic yarn and held up by a frame, the 7m-tall ‘Grandma’s House’ is now on display, giving people the chance to walk through the front door and enter the rooms most used by Marie’s grandma, Margaret Robinson.
From the brickwork outside to the furniture and items around the interior, every detail of the house has been meticulously recreated using digitally hacked Brother KH950i knitting machines.
Marie said: “People thought I was a bit mad at first when I told them about this project, but it’s something I’ve wanted to do for so long. I’ve been thinking and talking about it since at least 2019.
“It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where and when it began but since we moved to Chapelford, I’ve always been amazed at how similar all of the houses look. We all have the same trees and bushes. They sort of imprint onto your mind.
“It reminded me of the first large-scale knit I made in 2014 when I was doing my degree, but this will be even bigger and more technically challenging.”
For Marie, it is also a manifestation of her relationship with her grandma Margaret, who is now 86. Since she was about four years old, the house has been a constant presence in her life – a place of love and comfort as well as a growing patchwork of memories.
The installation, which has been created with the help of more than 100 volunteers and includes another wool to stretch more than 400 miles from Warrington to Land’s End, captures a moment in time too, with the acknowledgement that the places we hold dear are temporary. One day, Grandma’s House will belong to another family.
In that sense, Marie hopes visitors will bring their own experiences, associations and interpretations to the installation to think about what ‘home’ means to them.
Marie, one of arts charity Culture Warrington’s Associate Artists and a former winner of the Open Exhibition, added: “My sister and I would come and stay at grandma’s each year during the summer holidays. It was really exciting to come and stay as we grew up in a very rural area in the north of Anglesey.
“It felt very alive and awake at night to be there as there were no streetlights where we lived, just the moonlight. It feels strange to think that one day it will be the last time I step foot in there.”
It’s a very personal project but also a very ambitious one – so to make it possible, Marie was assisted by 113 people at a series of workshops at Warrington Museum.
From knitting enthusiasts to beginners, who fancied trying something new, the community rallied around with the age of volunteers ranging from two to 80-plus.
Marie said: “It was so fantastic. I really wanted people to feel connected to the artwork by being able to come and knit some of it for themselves. Seeing people return over three weekends to do more was such a lovely surprise.”
The exhibition of the “property” is on display at the Parr Hall until Saturday, with the Warrington Arts Festival concluding this weekend when a UFO experience and alien invasion will also be hovering in to close the festival in style on Saturday.
The close encounter for true believers and family audiences of all ages will be landing in Bank Park for a mysterious open air show called StarSaucer at 8.45pm.
Outdoor theatre specialists, The Dream Engine, are keeping the details of this newly developed performance a surprise.
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