Bocen Zhou

Tight Knit, BA Jewellery Design, Runner Up, 2023

The pieces in this series are crocheted with silver thread – wearable jewellery inspired by hand-crocheted sweaters my grandma made for me. They express the care and pressure I feel in the contradictory intergenerational relationships in Chinese families. The work reviews the intergenerational relationships in contemporary Chinese families, hoping to attract people’s attention to these.

When I was a child, I didn’t like to wear sweaters. Their fluff made me feel prickly and itchy, and high-necked versions made me feel that my neck was strangled and it was difficult to breathe. But because these sweaters were knitted by my grandma for me, they represented my grandma’s love. If I refused to wear them, my parents would think I’d failed my grandma’s love. I had to wear them when I felt uncomfortable. At this time, the love of grandma became heavy and stressful to me. This incident is the epitome of intergenerational relationships in contemporary Chinese families.

I decided to use crocheting techniques to combine silver and wool threads to show complex intergenerational dynamics. Wool symbolises the love of elders – it’s soft and warm. In contrast to sweaters, silver is cold and prickly, which is actually how I feel about sweaters. I want to use the contrast of these two materials to show the conflicts between different generations. When a warm sweater is damaged, the cool tinsel makes that damage more visible while repairing it. I use silver filament to create a visually fuzzy, sweater-like effect. When the wearer wears it, the seemingly soft but icy metal touches the skin, and that difference and conflict appear.

I hope this series will serve as a bridge to allow generations to better understand each other, so that all families in the world can better communicate and embrace each other with love.

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