Lisa Anne Auerbach

At first glance Lisa Anne Auerbach's installation could be taken for a high-spirited display in a women's clothes store. Several cheerleaders' costumes - in yarn rather than lycra - appear on mannequins. Behind them is a photomural showing young women modelling the outfits in a Robin Hood-themed location in Southern California. They offer a post-feminist twist on Robin's Merry Men. On closer inspection phrases echoing Nottingham's radical political history become legible on the knitwear, resonating with the concerns of today's anti-capitalist movement. Robin Hood, as both an overly-commodified cliché and the original re-distributor of wealth, is what ties Los Angeles, with its vast movie industry, to Nottingham, home to Sherwood Forest and medieval buildings contemporaneous with the legendary outlaw, many of them near the new Nottingham Contemporary. For our window display Auerbach has created what she calls 'Sherwood Chic'. Using knitting as a means to begin a political conversation and to intervene in social life, her radical and participatory knitwear gleefully challenges 21st century knitters to abandon knitting patterns and invent for themselves: "Stop making scarves, start making trouble."

Lisa Anne Auerbach