Doilies be damned, this ain’t your grandma’s crochet
By Nick Galvin
As a youngster, Luise Elsing was forced to learn crochet in home economics classes. It wasn’t a success.
“Everything was rejected and I just thought, ‘I’m shit at this’,” she says. “I was always hopeless.”
Fast-forward nearly 50 years and Elsing is riding high in the crochet world and preparing for an exhibition of her extraordinary creations that are about as far from traditional doilies or antimacassars as is possible.
Luise Elsing’s massive Blaze is inspired by Del Kathryn Barton’s film of the same name. Credit: Janie Barrett
Elsing’s return to the traditional craft came about 10 years ago after she was told to keep her hands moving because Dupuytren contracture, so-called Viking Disease, runs in both sides of the family.
“I went to the doctor and they said do something with your hands,” she says. “I thought I’ll take up crochet again and I loved it. I found it very therapeutic.”
Perhaps because of that early experience at school, Elsing was determined the work she made wouldn’t be practical in the conventional sense.
“I just started making stuff really for the feel of it and just moving my hands. I wasn’t even looking at the product. It was the process. I enjoyed the colours, I enjoyed the fabrics. I didn’t even think about an end product.”
For a while the pieces mounted up, stashed away in cupboards, until she got the idea of putting them together into larger creations. The turning point came when she read best-selling author Holly Ringland’s book The House That Joy Built, which celebrates the power of creativity and encourages those who think they don’t have a creative spark.
“I read that book, I just thought, ‘What have I got that’s creative?’” says Elsing, who lives in Woollahra where she is a long-time local councillor. “And then I opened up my cupboard and saw all of my stuff and I thought, right, I’m going to get it out and I’m going to show it.”
Since then, the number, size and ambition of Elsing’s works has grown, as have the ideas and inspiration behind them. Many of the works relate to movies she loves.
The centrepiece of Elsing’s first exhibition, which opens in July, is a massive, multi-hued work entitled Blaze. It’s based on the 2022 Del Kathryn Barton film of the same name in which a young girl is traumatised after witnessing a violent crime.
“I was trying to create a world where you can walk around safely free from your trauma, to create a safe space for living,” explains Elsing. “I saw the movie twice. I loved it. ”
Elsing agrees her work is a long way from what people expect to see when she says she is into crochet, but she delights in challenging expectations about the craft.
“I love that daggy, kitschy, little old lady thing – and subverting the genre into the unexpected.”
Blasé, an exhibition of Luise Elsing’s work, opens on July 16 at the Woollahra Gallery.
Elsing is appearing at the National Crochet Conference in Melbourne on Friday, June 28. The conference continues on Saturday.