Back to your roots

“Anna-Lisa Shandro’s textile installation, Back to your roots, spreads like an indoor bower over one side of the gallery. Embroidered and knitted leaves and vines and flowers climb up hanging handmade blankets and dangle from the ceiling. The installation looks like a chunky woolen Andy Goldsworthy piece, but its arrangement is less precise, its elements less precarious. Shandro tells me they are all made from remnants, thrifted, found, or gifted; “they really are fallen leaves from another project.” As handicrafts made from scraps, they are domestic in form but also in process: Shandro made them at home while watching television or listening to a podcast, during a time when she was working eight hours a day to make medical gear. They were a way to “come back down to my roots, spend some time with myself.” Gradually, she gathered a textile forest around herself: I just kind of knit nonstop for a really long time and... it kind of worked, I just feel more grounded and better and I feel like I’m at my roots and this is my little garden shrine thing that makes me feel at home and comfy and like myself. Shandro plans to make it her living room decor when she moves house. This appeals to me too, a den in the woods made into a blanket fort. I would settle down inside it and fondle its fuzzy forms, daydreaming with my fingers.” - Martha Radice