Anna Husemann sits in the centre of a striped Louis XVI sofa, her face framed by long golden curls and a perfectly straight-cut fringe. Behind her is a studio pinboard of colour swatches, mini skeins, stencil cutouts and magazine clippings. There is an orderliness to the whole arrangement – Anna, the sofa and the items of the board – which speaks of deliberation and careful consideration.

I first came across Anna’s work when her Mollig Hat appeared in Amie Gille’s Neons and Neutrals collection last year: A double layered stocking stitch beanie with abstract shapes arranged over the crown and around the brim in a way which suggested they were floating or somehow in suspended animation. Her commentary on the pattern speaks about drawing inspiration from the organic shapes of leaves and berries. To me, they looked like Matisse-esque forms, comfortably settled on the curved space they were decorating, each shape understanding the others so that altogether, there was something inexplicably whole and sympathetic in the design. At the same time this little accessory totally stood apart from the other designers’ patterns in the book for the way that it seemed to casually abandon the more common approach of patterning according to the axis of our knitted grid.

Today we received copies of her first printed collection in a new book called Intarsia Knits – and all of her designs seem to glow with this difficult-to-define apart-ness. It’s not just (or even) about her prolific use of intarsia for colourwork. Each of Anna’s designs feels like it’s taken a really deep and imaginative consideration of space and colour.
Who is Anna Husemann and might this be the book to get knitters to finally turn the Intarsia corner we’ve been peering around for the last few years?

I’ve arranged to talk to her to try and understand more about her practice and design. Our Zoom video link begins and I hastily straighten my myself and my lopsided cardigan and try to neaten the worst bits of an especially unruly hair day, as I take in the slightly intimidating Wes Andersen-ish tableaux on Anna’s side of my screen.

We begin by talking about the origins of her use of Intarsia. For novices, Intarsia is a colourwork knitting technique which uses separate balls of yarn to create distinct areas of colour in knitted fabric. Unlike the more common technique of stranded colourwork, which creates repeating coloured patterns along your rows, intarsia knitting allows you to create fields of colour which stand alone and are not part of a repeating series.

“I have a problem with repeats,” she explains.

And with this simple opening, Anna takes me directly to the thing I’ve been feeling about her work since the beginning. It neither repeats the work of others, nor does it repeat itself.
But wait a minute, as knitters, don’t we repeat all the time? We don’t ask why we repeat, we just ask how long the repeat is, what stitches it’s got and how many times we have to do it. Perhaps Anna Husemann has discovered a different knitting universe?

She explains intarsia knitting offered her a different pathway for design.

“During my Textile Design masters degree I developed a collage technique for skethcing and collecting colours and shapes. I wasn’t very good at drawing. But I figured out that I could turn natural landscapes and textures into paper collages and I could turn those into textiles. I tried the intarsia technique for this and it came really naturally.”

Her work is not about the technique – it uses the technique because it allows her designs to be what they are. It’s about the inspiration she takes from stones on the beach, the landscape out the window, the berries and leaves that have fallen from the tree, and she finds the materials, colours and textures to create them. In Anna’s hands, far from being a constraint on realising her collaged creativity, the grid of knitted rows and stitches has given her a canvas on which to realise it.

The result is a disarming deliberateness in her work. The designs may be rich in abstract shapes – but there is absolutely nothing random about their form and placement. They plainly lie exactly where they should, and they make perfect sense where they are. I have no idea why those pebble-shaped spots are there next to the boulders. But I definitely know they should be.

I look again at the pin board behind her. It all fits together. Well it plainly fitted together from the beginning. But somehow it also makes sense now.

Intarsia Knits by Anna Husemann, published October 2024, is now available online and in the shop.