It started innocently enough.
“My granddaughter was in Girl
Scouts, and one day she came
home and said, ‘Do you know how
to do gimp, Grandma?’” recounted
Catherine Evans, who had somehow
escaped the childhood rite of
passage of playing with plastic
craft lace. Undeterred, she hopped
online, learned a few stitches, and
like millions before her, fell in love
with the movement of the material.Twenty-plus miles of gimp later,
she’s still going.
Once Evans, who works out of
a studio at ArtSpace Maynard,
becomes entranced with an object,
she’ll work with it obsessively. “I
was raised on a farm and had to
amuse myself,” she explained.
“Clementine,” a wall-sized collection
of discarded orange boxes drenched
in white paint, takes up an entire
wall outside her studio. “It was
the first piece I made; making it I
realized you really have to follow
the art,” she said. “The boxes are so
beautiful; all of them are different
because they’re made so poorly. It
was like trying to staple Jell-O.”
Evans likes working with multiples
of things. “I did a series for six years
with rubber bathmats,” she said. “I
love working with grids and it has a
built-in grid.” Gimp was the next step.
“When I started doing this, my
granddaughter had just moved in
with us,” Evans said. “It was the
beginning of having to sit and talk,
chaperone and being with, so doing
this was real soothing to me. It’s
tranquil and peaceful.”
Evans started working with gimp in
the fall of 2009. “It’s organic,” she
said. “I went from one, to two, to 65
strands. The first piece, ‘14.2 Miles of
Gimp,’ was displayed at the Danforth (Museum of Art in Framingham). For
Regis College, I increased it by 30
percent — to ‘19.2 Miles of Gimp.’
Now it’s ‘20-Something Miles of
Gimp.’”
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