Madeleine Shepherd is a textile artist with a background in science, maths and science fiction. Her practice includes community art installations and interdisciplinary collaborations. Under the brand name Knot Unknot, she also creates wall hangings, textile jewellery and fashion accessories and soft furnishings.

Madeleine's current work uses image data and simple algorithms to generate patterns as the starting point for machine knitted fabrics. She uses domestic knitting machines from the 1980s that have been hacked to link directly to a laptop, enabling her to avoid the machines' built-in restrictions on pattern size and symmetry. Non-repeating patterns and even portraits can be knitted this way.

In this display you will find new additions to the Knitting Life collection. This arose from Madeleine's Connected Innovators project at Creative Informatics, University of Edinburgh, where she researched the potential for combining historical Fair Isle knitting and an algorithm called Conway's Game of Life. She blended motifs from the algorithm's output with traditional pattern placement and colours of 19th Century Fair Isle. The result is both mathematically rigorous and a fine tribute to Fair Isle hand knitting heritage.

If you would like to learn about machine knitting, Madeleine will be teaching a range of classes from late spring 2025 in her studio at Coburg House.