Brighton-based textile artist Kate Jenkins has turned pulling the wool over our eyes into an art form. From her Kemp Town studio, brimming with colourful knitting yarns, she knits and crochets foodie-themed treats which appear so realistic they look good enough to eat.
There is seemingly no dish she can’t render exquisitely with yarn and embroidery stitches – everything from a traditional English breakfast to a mouthwatering Christmas roast, complete with turkey, sprouts and those all-important pigs in blankets.
She has even created entire foodie emporiums, including a crocheted patisserie, a knitted bakery laden with breads, bagels and cakes, and a fish counter brimming with woolly lobster and crab, sequinned sea bass and freshly-knitted anchovies. And all her work is laced with a rich dollop of British nostalgia and cheeky seaside humour.
‘I treat the crochet hook like a paintbrush and it never ceases to amaze me how precise you can be with wool,’ she says. ‘But whatever I create, whether it’s a carton of French fries or a tin of sardines, I always infuse my work with a splash of warmth and a dash of wit. Above all, I want to make people smile.’
Kate started knitting at her grandmother’s knee in the Rhymney Valley in South Wales. ‘My grandmother was an amazing knitter, as was my mum, but I couldn’t get the hang of it, so I took up crocheting instead. Even in my early teens I was adapting knitting patterns from 1970s Marshall Cavendish books and creating my own designs.’
After graduating with a degree in fashion textiles and business studies from the University of Brighton, Kate launched her freelance career, producing knitwear for designers such as Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren and Kate Spade before setting up her own clothing and accessories label, Cardigan, in 2003.
‘I was struggling to get my business off the ground, and needed publicity, when a friend suggested I take part in the Brighton and Hove Artists Open Houses,’ she says. ‘I thought, “What can I do which will get people talking about knitwear?”’
The result was her 2007 Comfort Food collection which celebrated everything from fish and chips, and bangers and mash, to sardines on toast – dishes that she knew would resonate with people.
As planned, her quirky designs began generating headlines and a London gallery invited her to mount several solo shows. For the first, Kate’s Cafe, in 2009, she created a classic greasy spoon, serving up plates of woolly fried food, including sausage and egg in an enormous, knitted frying pan.
A year later she created her follow-up show, Come Dine With Kate, and began injecting humour into her work with clever word puns. She knitted a dressed crab in an elegant top hat and tails, a smoked mackerel cheekily puffing on a cigarette and a cow in Wellington boots to illustrate Beef Wellington.
Next, in 2011, came Kate’s Crochet Market, inspired by some of the most recognisable foods on supermarket shelves, including Heinz tomato ‘stitchup’, ‘Fluffy’ liquid and ‘Taba-sew woolly’ sauce.
Every show was a sell-out, and she was soon working with established brands. Pommery Champagne, then the official sponsors for the contemporary art fair Frieze London, commissioned her to create a knitted version of their champagne bottles for the first ever art installation on the London Eye. Prudential Insurance asked her to crochet a map of the United States for a major billboard campaign in New York. And as her cachet grew, she began attracting celebrity clients.
Comedian Alan Carr snapped up a bottle of crocheted Babycham and displayed it on his Channel 4 chat show Chatty Man, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver bought a pack of saddleback ‘sew-sages’ with little nose rings, and bestselling novelist Jane Fallon snapped up two woolly sardines on toast to brighten up the home she shares with her partner, Ricky Gervais.
Then, in 2015, in what Kate describes as a career turning point, she was asked to exhibit at the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace in north London where she created a fishmongers called Kate’s Plaice.
‘I didn’t know where to start so every time I went on holiday in, say, Barcelona or Tokyo, I’d visit the fish market and obsessively look at how things were displayed there,’ she says. ‘At the time there was a fish shop in St James’s Street in Kemp Town, and I befriended the owner. She thought I was completely mad. I’d buy a scallop and she’d say, “Is this to eat or to knit?”
‘With the help of an amazing carpenter, I created an enormous fish counter and sourced crushed display glass to mimic crushed ice. Then I got to work knitting lobsters, sardines, prawns, scallops, cockles, mussels, tentacles and squid. It was painstaking work.’
Kate, who has many imitators, is reluctant to share her techniques, although, for that particular project, she used a mixture of crochet, embroidery, printing and hand sequinning for the fish scales. Even though she had a loyal team of helpers, the fish counter took no fewer than nine months to complete. Such is her skill that she works without preparatory drawings.
‘I love the way that yarn can be sculpted and manipulated into any form you want,’ she says. ‘I use the same stitches and techniques in designing a garment as I do in a plate of food or a bottle of champagne. I don’t see it as a different process. As I’ve been designing for such a long time, I instinctively know what stitches will work best for certain items.’
It is nevertheless painstaking work. It takes an hour to sequin one sardine and two days to produce an ice-cream cone. ‘Meeting my deadlines can be stressful, but I have a team of fashion students who create things for me en masse. I find it quite hard allowing other people to help, but I don’t want to spend all my time crocheting individual peas.’
Kate recently turned from fish to all things bready for an exhibition called Kate’s Bakes. Featuring more than a thousand knitted cakes, breads, tarts and crocheted pastries, it toured Barcelona, Hong Kong and Holland.
‘I don’t like repeating myself and I get copied quite a lot, so before the start of every project I ask myself, “What hasn’t been done?”’ she says. ‘I often scroll through Pinterest and then do the exact opposite.
During lockdown in 2021, Museum Rijswijk in the Netherlands invited her to take part in its Textile Biennale. After winning the public vote, she was invited to host a solo show for which she created a life-size bakery, food plaza and ice-cream parlour.
‘We had a patisserie counter and shelves laden with breads, bagels and croissants. We even devoted one area to popular Dutch cuisine such as Dutch fries and waffles. Visitors loved it.’
When her exhibitions end, much of her work is sold to private collectors. She has a particularly devoted following in the United States because Viking Cruises, who ferry a lot of Americans to far-flung destinations, displays her work on its liners.
When I ask what drives her endless creativity, she says, ‘Making people laugh. If somebody asked me to tell a joke, I wouldn’t know where to start and I’d forget the punchline. But I can look at a foodie item and turn it into a funny play on words without hesitation.
‘A couple of years ago I came across a tin of pineapple chunks in a supermarket. I looked at the tin and thought, “If I get rid of the ‘c’ in chunks, it will make pineapple hunks. And then I can turn the tin into a hunky bodybuilder pineapple.” I see a word and work backwards.’
Her exhibits certainly have us in stitches.
katejenkinsstudio.co.uk
