Ninety pounds of yarn, 15 years of work, one incredible story.
That's the advertised description of , Kirk Dunn's one-man show touring to B.C. for the first time in April with performances in Surrey, Coquitlam, Maple Ridge, Powell River, Sidney, Gabriola, Trail, Oliver and Cranbrook.
A Toronto-based actor and avid knitter, Dunn began creating three large knitted tapestries back in 2003, each based on the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and didn't finish them until 2018.
Wanting to showcase his labour-of-love art, and with no gallery keen to show it, he went about creating a theatre show as a way of bringing his tapestries to the people.
"We needed to exhibit them ourselves," Dunn says of The Knitting Pilgrim, co-written by his wife Claire Ross Dunn and debuted in 2019. "Because my background was in theatre and acting, it just became a pretty good idea, at that point, to do a one-man show. It's worked incredibly well."
The hour-long, multidisciplinary show features storytelling, image projection and knitted panels that look like stained-glass windows.
Audience members are encouraged to knit while Dunn talks about his artistic journey as an ordinary guy who happens to be an extraordinary knitter with questions about religion.
Years ago, Dunn picked up knitting as a way to kill time between acting jobs, at auditions and also while waiting on set for his call.
"I got pretty good at that, and started doing some designs," Dunn recalled in a phone call. "Then I was told by the head of a museum that I should get into doing installations. That was just after 9/11, and I was looking around at the world as a PK, a preacher's kid. I had a background in faith with a father who was a minister (with) a very open, liberal and inclusive theology, and I was kind of looking at these three faiths and wondering why it was that we just couldn't get along.鈥� That's where the idea came from."
Granted some money to get it done, Dunn went to work on the tapestries.
And continued to work.
Then worked some more.
"You know, I told the arts council, 'Ah, it'll take me 10 months.' And of course, it was way, way, way more work than that," he said. "I didn't know what I didn't know, and the whole thing was pretty overwhelming. I was on an incredible journey of self-doubt and learning and embarrassment and fear of failure and, you know, financial trouble. Of course, I'm married as well, so there's the thing of what happens to your marriage when you're working on one thing for so long, too."
Storing and transporting the tapestries is a bit of a chore, apparently.
"At my house they stay rolled up, to protect them, in some chest freezers, for two reasons. One is I've been told by lots of textile conservators that light is the enemy of textiles, so they should stay in the dark. And the other thing is that having them frozen, it means that they're not at risk with any moths or bugs or anything because that zero (temperature) would kill anything that ever got onto them."
Today, Dunn says, the tapestries look pretty much exactly the way they did the day he finished them, "because they spend about 99.99 per cent of their time in the dark. But yeah, we have them all rolled up and I move them around in big bags. Each one will fit into a huge suitcase all rolled up, and then on the day (of a show) we spread it out, we put it in a big frame and then we cover it with a projection screen. We project images onto those screens, and then those screens come down right at the very end of the show, when we reveal the tapestries. So they spend very little time in the light, even during the show."
Linked on is Neville Madill's about Dunn and his post-9/11 knitting.
"The theme of the tapestries is still incredible relevant today," Dunn underlined. "One of my fears while doing this work was, 'It's taking me so long, 15 years, you know, and will any of this even matter when I finish it? Nobody is going to care, it'll all be worked out,' right? But what's happening now in the world, it's incredibly relevant.
"The show isn't preachy, it's just topical," he added. "We just ask the questions and live in the hope of continuing to ask these questions, the possibilities of how we can move forward, how can we make this work."
