Four years ago, writer and textile artist Patrick Carroll helped his father, who had developed a neurodegenerative disorder, arrange his own suicide with the help of a doctor in California. “It completely changed the way I functioned,” he says, “having to step up and bring about my father’s death.” A month or so later, the pandemic lockdowns began. isolated and sad, Carroll distracts himself by learning to knit using a 1970s Studio SK-560 machine he found on Craigslist. Most days he made a new outfit, many of them in flesh tones and bare skin, decorated with full language: for example, a high garment with “eternity” or a man’s thong, his pouch decorated with “wrath” God. “
Carroll, who is 34 and grew up in the Bay Area, posted photos of himself wearing the clothes on Instagram. He developed a small following, and designer Jonathan Anderson presented some of his sweaters in a spring 2023 runway show. “I could see what I was doing was fashionable,” Carroll says. “But it was also a way to be hot on the internet, and part of its function was to break loneliness.” Like many others during those quarantine years, he felt that the internet was the only place where he could express himself and share his weirdness. “Getting rid of it was a long, weird process,” he says. “But I think a lot of people have experienced something similar.”
Eventually Carroll met his boyfriend – online – and decided he was an artist, not a knitwear designer. Now he works in a studio near downtown Los Angeles, where he moved — after spending his 20s in New York as an SAT tutor and getting an MFA in fiction at the University of California, Riverside — to finish writing his first novel. Here, surrounded by cones of colorful cashmere, linen and silk yarn that he often buys surplus from European clothing companies, Carroll obsesses over words in a different way, inserting them into ever-larger knitted panels that he stretches across wooden rods like canvases and shouts “poem paintings with pictures.” Although he is not represented by a gallery, he has recently had five solo exhibitions, including one at the JW Anderson boutique in Milan during the Salone del Mobile design fair last month.
Unlike most fiber artists, Carroll prefers simple techniques. He generally knits in a looser range than usual, a self-taught accident that allowed him to experiment with transparency, texture and lettering. And as he strives to develop his art, he draws more inspiration from artists such as William Blake, Renée Green and Adrian Piper, whose work prioritizes language. Many of his works contain single words, such as “denial” or “surrender,” that tend to trigger emotions and memories. “They’re immediately relatable to anyone looking at them,” he says. “Like ‘shame,'” he adds, pointing to his studio wall. “The word is in shiny Lurex, so it’s very shiny.”
Although he dresses his body less often, sex and sexuality remain central to his practice. The artist chooses certain terms—“really,” for example—because he wants the pieces, when grouped together, to read not just so seriously, but also funny and flamboyant, a choice he underscores by quoting quotes from queer writers like Frank Bidart. Emily Dickinson, Derek Jarman and Essex Hemphill. Lately, he has been trying to contribute short poems of his own, but often rejects the results. He kept one recently, however, pleased with how it turned out: “The existence of the past guarantees the eternity of every soul,” it says in barely legible white letters inside a bordered square of purple cashmere, as soft as the message it conveys.