The Domestic Soundscape

It was with great excitement and high expectations that I read Alan Butler’s book; Sheep – The remarkable story of the humble animal that built the modern world. Opening with promisingly rapturous words on the importance of our ovine friends, the book goes on to deliver an account of the significance of sheep throughout the ages with a particular focus on the crucial economic role that International wool trade has played in shaping the modern world.

Sheep skull, Sussex

I admire the ambitions behind this attempt to furnish the world with a complete account of the contribution that sheep and wool have made to history. As a rudimentary introduction to the role that sheep and wool played in feudal society, the processes of enclosure, the Highland Clearances, the Industrial Revolution, Colonisation and the building of The British Empire, this book is really quite useful as a cursory guide. However I would qualify this by saying that in my opinion Butler takes a curiously censorious and self-serving approach to history, and that his account – whilst rapturously celebrating the connections between sheep, civilisations and Butler’s other historical interests* – skips glibly over slavery, displacement, class and many of the extremely difficult politics surrounding wool.

Sheep

Now I am much happier with the notion that wool is an unproblematic commodity, tied only to histories of egalitarian governments, jolly farmers and honest land-acquisition than with the truth, which is that wool – like everything else that Britain produced in order to fund its Imperialist conquests – is mired in Autocracy, Colonialism and Human Rights Abuses. And I think it’s asking too much from a book on the history of sheep to expect that it will contain a soul-searching analysis of the social and cultural consequences of The British Empire as well as a complete report on the intricacies of the wool trade, but the tone of this book is so unforgiveably swollen with Nationalist pride that you may well find yourself demanding such a soul-searching analysis upon reading it. Although Butler is careful to concede that ‘there is nothing heroic or morally justifiable about subjugating millions of people in lands far from one’s own shores,’ his unfortunate ommissions and casual asides concerning Britain’s Colonial past represent such a conservative description of the world and its many cultures that I find myself mistrustful of his account.

Nonetheless I would in summary recommend this book as a good, basic introduction to the historical global movements of sheep and the wool trade and it was certainly useful for me to read in terms of the outline it provides on just how downright dark and dirty the history of wool is. Butler’s account mercifully spares sheep from comedic forms of representation and makes a fairly convincing case for our historic dependence on these animals, and this reminder seems especially relevant in contemporary times, where many sheep farmers are losing money on the wool from their animals.**

Shearing

None of this means I’m comfortable with the conservative tone of Alan Butler’s book, but given the immutable nature of the past and the undeniable truth that wool is historically tied up with Empire and Domination, perhaps I should turn my attentions towards the role sheep may play in a more egalitarian and sustainable future world? Or maybe there is another way to explore the history of wool. In either case I am sure there are some nuances, tangents, regional specificities and careful details which Butler – in his overarching quest to link Sheep with Greatness – could not afford to deviate towards. So if you have any good recommendations for history books that deal with sheep or wool in any sense, do please leave them here.

*Alan Butler’s other obsession makes its way into both the references and the main writing of his Sheep book!

**According to one farmer, in 2009 a shearer will gain £1.10 for every animal that is sheared, while the Wool Marketing Board will pay only 80p for the fleece thus obtained, creating a loss of 30p on every sheep.

I have but one and a half of our delicious squashkins left, for I just grated the other half into a squash/ginger cake for tonight’s workshop attendees. I have also loaded all the wool assembled so far into a very large suitcase. Nobody is going to be short of any desired colour, that’s for sure… and hopefully my little mass of knitted vegetables will provide ample inspiration and examples.

Mmmmmm… oranges…

I’ve also been brushing up on my spherical object maths and perfecting my own set of ideas about how the sphere can be adapted for the stress-free improvisation of most knitted vegetables. Preparing for the workshop has clarified for me the difference between knowing a thing and knowing how to show what you know to others. It has also fired up in me a great desire to knit up an unrivalled collection of vegetables that will truly communicate the way that I feel about things that grow. I mean I just find vegetables and fruits – their form, their colours, their surfaces, their tactile qualities – mind-blowingly amazing. I love the everyday wonderment of vegetables and fruits; every fact of their growth and development, and every element of their design. I love that using fruits and vegetables is a daily activity, and one that is full of visual and olfactory interest; the stickiness, the smells, the tactile qualities. I love that I can experience fruits and vegetables on a daily basis and continually find them extraordinary.

It was no surprise to me, therefore, to find out in art college that Still Life paintings are often painted with a high degree of symbolism. There are dozens of art textbooks that will tell you about the importance of the humble fruit and vegetable as painted by Fra Juan Sánchez Cotán, for instance, like this beauty:

In the legacy of this great tradition within Western Art History, nobody would find it remotely crazy or amusing if I decided to set up a Still Life oil-painting workshop. But the notion of ‘knitted vegetables’ strikes everyone as sort of bonkers. Having painted many bits of fruit and bunches of flowers in the past, I can testify that the imaginative process of observing and recreating a thing from one medium into another, remains the same. There are many bad painters of fruit and vegetables; there are many naff patterns for fruit and vegetables. But it is also possible to obtain or create incredible renditions of fruit and veg in either paint or yarn, and why is it more insane to place lovely recreations of the things that inspire you most into your fruit/veg bowl and onto your kitchen shelf, than onto one’s walls?

I don’t wish here to ‘elevate’ my knitted vegetables to the level of genius recreation achieved in, say, the painting cited above. But it is curious to notice the ways in which knitting still isn’t free from a certain amount of functional utility which prevents the world at large from imagining it to be as limitless, as creative, as endless and as exciting as painting. In plain English, it is still seen as some kind of crime to invest yarn in ‘useless’ projects like fruit and veg when one could be making ‘useful’ clothes. Whereas I think it is safe to say that the value of Still Life painting remains somewhat unquestioned and even the most ardent knitters of ‘Useful’ things will most likely have some inspiring reproductions on their walls. So as I pack for the workshop, I’m wondering when we will start recognising that Art is as useful, and necessary, as jumpers, and I’m excited to see what all the wool in my large suitcase will become, this evening.