Knit Club

Hardcover118 pages, 50 color plates8 x 11 in. / 203 x 279 mmEssay by Rebecca Bengal2020ISBN 978-1-942953-40-1 A foreboding meditation in the vein of Southern Gothic literature, Drake’s most recent body of work emerged through her collaboration with an enigmatic group of women loosely calling themselves “Knit Club.” The nature of the club is ambiguous. It is a cross between a gang, a cult of mysteries, and a group of friends bound by secrets only they share. The book follows a narrative structure loosely borrowed from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying—that is to say, not one omniscient narrator but many disparate stream-of-consciousness voices. We sense the authorship of the photographs to be collaborative, the result of creative play between Drake and the club in which she found herself embedded, their process a kind of alchemy. In the style of the Gothic, Drake’s masterful use of color to create mood opens the door to the tension between the real and the supernatural. What we find, however, i