In 2015, Kate Just Knit Claude Cahun’s Self-Portrait As Part of Her ‘Feminist Fan’ Series
Claude Cahun was a French artist, photographer and writer whose work often undermined traditional concepts of gender roles. The BBC profiled her in 2016. HypocriteDesign has an in-depth profile here.
Cahun actively and outwardly rejected social constructions of gender and sexual identity. To Cahun, identity was mutable, or unstable. In her self-portraits, she presented herself sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman, sometimes thoroughly androgynous, and sometimes so heavily made-up and costumed that it was impossible to determine her persona’s gender.
This is one of her self-portraits:
Kate Just is an American-born Australian visual artist. Since 2002, Just has created an expansive body of visual art work in a diversity of media including knitting, resin, clay, collage and photo-media. Since 2015, she has been working on a knitted series titled Feminist Fan, hand-knitted homages to self-portraits or artworks by feminist artists around the globe.
This is her hand-knit homage to Claude Cahun:
Kate Just, Feminist Fan #15 (Claude Cahun, Self Portrait), 2015
See more of Kate’s Feminist Fan knits.
