At a ball a day for the past 15 years, artist Patricia cute, soft toys turn out to be monstrous,” she says,
Waller estimates she’s crocheted over 500 miles pointing out that these pieces grapple with violence of yarn into artworks, including a bear impaled on a against animals and child abuse, respectively. unicorn’s horn, a roasted pig’s head, a leg prosthesis, To begin a piece, Waller builds a form from wire and a seven-foot suit of armor, all both playful and mesh, cotton wool, paper, and glue. Then she dead serious. conceals it in obsessively chosen yarn. On shopping
In her last year as an art student, Waller turned to trips, she often brings along her subject of the moment, yarn to escape the burdens of traditional sculpture. a bread roll for example, to match the exact color. “I couldn’t move anything I made alone,” she says Despite championing “feminine” art, Waller still ruefully from her home studio in Karlsruhe, Germany. can’t make a pair of socks. Her disinterest in working “I always had to ask someone to help me. I didn’t from a pattern just might date back to her first like it.” project, a potholder she made in school when she
Photography by Patricia Waller
Tired of heavy tools and heavy lifting, Waller found was 9. “The piece looked so awful that my mother independence through crochet. “I take advantage of put it in the garbage immediately,” she confesses, this image of ‘housewife art’,” she explains. “At first then adds, “I think my technique has improved since glance, my work appears innocent; on a closer look then.” —Eric Smillie you discover a sort of vicious irony. When people start smiling or laughing at my work, I know that my >> Patricia Waller: patriciawaller.com first step to approaching them has been successful.”
In her favorite series, How to Kill Your First Love, a dart sticks in a rubber ducky’s head and scissors protrude from a bleeding doll. “Sometimes my
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