Crocheted Portraits by Jo Hamilton

Artist Jo Hamilton ‘paints’ portraits with a rather non-traditional material: yarn.  She meticulously crochets portraits from photographs of people, often friends.  The unusual medium for the familiar art-form provides the unexpected on several levels.  Each portrait has a texture very different from common painterliness – they’re soft, knotty, and bordered by loose ambiguous edges.  Hamilton’s material perhaps also goes further to suggest her relationship with her subjects.  Each portrait takes a considerable amount of time and intimate work by hand.  Further, the crochet process is reminiscent of household trinkets and decorations lending her work a feeling of life and home.