American artist Magda Sayeg was invited to create a public artwork for Urbanity:(Re)Engaged as part of the City of Sydney Laneways festival in 2011 by Amanda Sharrad and co-curator Justine Topfer while they were both based in San Francisco. The curatorial brief and vision for Urbanity:(Re)Engaged was to inhabit and activate urban space with artworks produced at the intersection of commissioned public art and the spontaneous creative. The curatorial idea was to explore the tension between these two instances of art occurring in the public realm. Three artists were brought to Sydney from the United States, all with high profile creative practices involving street art (Barry McGee), guerrilla knitting (Magda Sayeg) and design/placemaking activism (Rebar), along with First Nations artist Brook Andrew from Melbourne. ​

American artist Magda Sayeg was the founder of the international guerrilla knitting “yarn Bombing” movement in 2005, inspiring a generation of artists to inhabit urban space with knitted artworks. Under the name Knitta Please, Sayeg produced a brilliant thirty-meter knitted artwork for the Sydney Laneways Festival installed on the stair leading down into Sussex Lane from Kent Street. The installation created an extraordinary soft-form Op artwork in kaleidoscopic colour, hugging the ground in striking contrast to the hard-edged cool concrete grey surroundings.

Images: City of Sydney