On a trip I took a couple years ago, I made 26 lemons for an awareness drive about how crafting can help people with stress or mental health trouble. It was such a good craft for traveling, and this topic is very close to my heart.
This was a commissioned artwork exhibited at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum. Part of Creativity and Cognition conference, 2017.
Materials
Arduino
BCI
Custom Yarn Sculpture
Description
The popularity of knitting and crochet, or yarncraft, is on the ascent. As more people discover its pleasures, enthusiasts and neuroscientists are also realizing that crafting with yarn elicits soothing and therapeutic effects. The meditative aspects of knitting and crochet are already familiar to the legions of yarncrafters, but recognition of the neuroscience of yarncraft is a relatively recent phenomenon. This work embodies the relationship between yarncraft and its neurological benefits with a physical art project. This project takes the form of a large crocheted e-textile brain sculpture with embedded LEDs whose illumination is controlled live by a brain-computer interface worn by a yarncrafting practitioner. This sculpture visualizes the changes in the neurology of the yarncrafter.