Rachel Von Albach

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

Labour and Language

My practice engages with the inheritance of craft knowledge passed down through generations of women in my family. Working primarily with crochet, I explore how domestic, time-intensive techniques can be repositioned within a contemporary art context to examine ideas of labour, identity, and memory. Crochet, for me, is both language and archive, a slow, tactile method of thinking through material that carries histories of care, endurance, and resistance. 

This year’s body of work unfolds through three ongoing strands: The Archival Documents, The Decoded Documents, and The Encoded Document. These series explore how inherited gestures of making can be reimagined as critical acts of translation and preservation. The Archival Documents draw directly from the tablecloths made by my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, objects that once held quiet authority within domestic space. I have added my own archival document in the form of a large circular crochet work, one that embodies many hours of labour. Each stitch becomes an act of remembrance, a way of tracing lineage through touch. In contrast, The Decoded Documents translate systems of language, from television scripts, such as The Handmaids Tale and Call The Midwife, into crochet, pattern and code. Working with predetermined rules, I allow the work to unfold algorithmically, transforming words and rhythms into patterns of loop and knot. The resulting surfaces conceal and reveal simultaneously: familiar, decorative forms embedded with hidden structures of meaning. 

This process merges craft and code, suggesting that the gestures of the hand can mirror those of the digital world, slow, patterned, and endlessly repeated. Alongside this is The Encoded Document, in which I have taken a body of text written by Elize Visser, transformed it into binary code, and then crocheted it using two stitches representing 0 and 1. Across these works, I am interested in how labour becomes both visible and invisible. The repetitive motion of crocheting embodies persistence, yet the evidence of that time often remains concealed within the object. My materials, fine white cotton thread and traditional stitches, deliberately evoke the histories of women’s work that have long been undervalued. 

Through scale, context, and presentation, I reposition these gestures, asking how they might operate as forms of resistance and care rather than domestic expectation. The shadows cast by the works, as light passes through the threads, form another kind of document, one made of absence and echo. They remind me that meaning often lives in what is unseen: the pauses between stitches, the silences between generations. Crochet becomes a method of translation, a way of writing through thread, where stories of endurance and tenderness are made material. Ultimately, my practice is an act of continuation. Through repetition and reinterpretation, I extend the gestures of my foremothers into the present, allowing their craft to speak anew. Each work exists as both memory and code, a record of time, care, and the unbroken continuity of making.