Knit Urinary System was created for the exhibition Fluid Dynamics at Angel’s Gate Cultural Center in 2025, curated by Katie Shanks.
What happens when we take a material that we usually associate with being outside of the body, and create something we associate with the inside of the body? There is a reversal of interiority and exteriority—expectations are flipped upside down—making us question the very nature of things and our corporeal existence. That is what I want the viewer to feel when looking at the Knit Urinary System I have created. This is the newest iteration in a series of knitted body parts I’ve made throughout my career.
I knit body parts because knitting is a medium closely connected to the body. Our bodies touch, wear, and interact with knitted things every day. Our bodies, much like knitting, are intricate systems of interconnected parts that work together in miraculous ways. Knitting is soft, warm, and cozy. It carries connotations of sweet memories of gifts from grandma or a beloved aunt. It works against notions of the grotesque or the abject that we can sometimes experience when looking at medical dissections of the human form. It reverses our expectations of what the body, as both object and subject, is supposed to be, making its inner parts into a thing of comfort instead of something to be feared. It takes us out of the everyday and makes us look at the body in a new way. It lets us marvel at the structure and form of our anatomy, and takes both the body and knitting out of the quotidian and into the realm of the sublime.
It challenges assumptions of gender as well. You can’t work with the body or knitting without working with ideas around gender. Knitting is a very feminine coded medium and medicine is traditionally a very masculine coded field. Through my own identity as a queer, non-binary person, I enjoy juxtaposing the masculine with the feminine to queer presumptions of gender. Who says knitting has to be feminine? Who says depictions of medicine have to be masculine?
Through engaging with ideas of the gender binary in this way, I aim to both eschew and play with it, rejecting the binary while also acknowledging it, and expanding gender’s potential. That is why I have decided not to depict any gendered aspect of the urinary system itself in this piece. Our urinary systems can be very gendered, being connected to our genitals, which are so-called primary sex characteristics. I wanted anyone of any gender to be able to see themselves reflected in this work, so I decided to not privilege any one gender over another by not displaying any gendered aspects of the body itself.
Thinking of the body, we have to think of fluids as well. We are, after all, 70% water. The knit urinary system portrays arteries, ureters, kidneys, and the bladder: vessels for fluids of the body. Fabric has something fluid about it as well. Yarn moves and flows as it loops around itself in the process of knitting. There are fluid dynamics at play here. Even though, ironically, literal fluid is something you very much want to keep away from yarn, here it is used to depict fluid itself, again, going back to reversing expectations of subject and form to make us look at the body in a new way.
Through this, the Knit Urinary System becomes more than just a representation of anatomy—it’s a meditation on material, identity, and perception. By merging the internal with the external, the soft with the clinical, and the fluid with the fixed, this piece invites the viewer to reimagine the body as a site of complexity, beauty, and transformation. It is an invitation to see ourselves—not as static or binary—but as intricately knit together beings, fluid in form, identity, and meaning.