Stripes

They repainted the stripes on the road in front of the Boggy Thicket last month.  I found that confusing, since the road needed repaving a lot worse than it needed repainting, but I’m not complaining.  It’s nice to see the county hasn’t forgotten we exist.

Painting highway stripes is a thankless and occasionally dangerous job.  I had a friend in college who took a summer job running a striping machine like this one

He got slapped in the face by the mirror on a passing truck, and spent most of the summer in the hospital.

Now, most highway striping is done with rigs like this:

 

That’s undoubtedly safer, but the guys in the trucks are much more likely to do this:

 

or this:

Or one of these:

Maybe it would be better to just do this:

This is part of the Knitted Mile, a work by artist Robyn Love.

The Knitted Mile was commissioned as part of an exhibition titled Gestures of Resistance: Craft and The Politics of Slowness (curated by Shannon Stratton and Judith Leeman) that happened in conjunction with the College Art Association 2008 conference in Dallas, TX.

Ninety knitters from around North America contributed pieces of TKM. Photographs of each knitter working on their section were included as part of the piece when it was removed from the road and installed in the gallery, Grey Matter.

TKM also was exhibited at PS.122 as part of the exhibition Yarn Theory, curated by Martha Lewis.

Yarn for TKM was generously donated by Lion Brand Yarn.

 

 The same artist is also responsible for the Water Tower Cozy.