If you find this funny ...

PATRICK HAMILTON

RIPPING YARNS: Nelson artist Megan Hansen-Knarhoi with her favourite material

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What's in a name? Quite a lot, as Charles Anderson found when he talked to Megan Hansen-Knarhoi.

Last year on national television, controversial breakfast host Paul Henry was confronted by two small breasts created entirely out of wool. They were plump and meticulously made – created over many hours of repetitive motion and fashioned into something that would eventually become known as White Boob/Black Boob. They were cute, if anything; they represented sexuality, spirituality, simplicity and domesticity. Henry took one look, sneered and said: "That's not art."

"It's my favourite comment I've ever had about my work," says the boobs' creator and now Nelson resident Megan Hansen-Knarhoi. The excitement with which she tells the story of Henry's reaction comes as no surprise when you learn she once began studying towards her art history masters degree on the use of the word "ugly" in New Zealand art criticism.

Hansen-Knarhoi has a thing for names, labels and tangles. Don't call her a knitter, crochet specialist or a craft artist, especially not a craft artist. The work she creates she refers to as "sculptural installation" but before she settled on that term she used to tell people she was an amateur singer and dancer. She was, of course, neither, but the faux job title tells you something else about Hansen-Knarhoi – she has a sense of humour.

Any idiot can do what she does, or so she says, and that is the point. Far from taking inspiration from the great names of the international and domestic art scenes, Hansen-Knarhoi looks closer to home. She takes inspiration from the anonymous – the "op-shop" doilies, the grandmas sitting at home knitting small crucifix book marks.

As a girl, the sculptural installation artist was a keen tap dancer. She enjoyed the dancing but preferred the sequins that would fall off her colleagues' elaborate leotards as they pranced around the stage. After recitals she would get down on her hands and knees picking up every single sequin she could find. Then she would sellotape them to her ears. "I was the only tap dancer with sellotape sequin earrings," she says proudly.

Her mother used to work for a jersey company and would often come home with the off-cuts of material and let her daughter go crazy sewing them all together. Her grandmother owned a large wooden chest filled with tangled woollen balls. Hansen-Knarhoi would jump in and lose herself untangling for hours.

It is perhaps no surprise then that she cannot understand straight lines. Grid systems freak her out a little and she has at times found herself lost heading into Nelson City. Melbourne is a nightmare. Mathematical paper is horrid. Yet she still chooses to work with it in helping to create her visions.

"There is no denying I use crafty-based materials and methods but they are methods a child could use. I hate to be called a crochet artist. Crochet implies craft, implies boring. It's limiting."

Hansen-Knarhoi's work is anything but. It's clever, smart, cute, funny and serious.

Sitting on the kitchen table of her Nelson home are dozens of small white hands. They are being prepared for her next exhibition, Righteous. Her last exhibition Flock featured similar woollen hands pressed together in prayer but where some saw a religious motif others saw the silent clap of woollen applause.

"I'm interest in how two people can interpret two things completely differently. It's open ended."

Jesus lies under Hansen-Knarhoi's bed. The endless knot of coloured wool with no discernable end or beginning is one of her larger works. The alpha and omega are lost in that box somewhere. When on exhibition the piece is wrapped around hundreds of nails, hammered into the wall in a specialised and well rehearsed way. The eventual apparition you see before you is the son of God saying his own name with frantic repetition.

But where some of her work might carry heavy implication others are just having a bit of fun. Much like the art that Paul Henry thought so little of, Happy Poo is a soft brown creation sitting merrily on a white blanket. Another piece features a large cream object. It is soft and bulbous. It is an enormous crocheted stuffed penis called Hampton Wick (cockney rhyming slang for prick).

It is inevitable that some might not like her work, they might even be offended. However others believe Hansen-Knarhoi is on to something.

In 2004, she was selected by former Artspace director Tobias Berger to represent New Zealand at the Sao Paolo Biennale, where her crocheted doll, Topsy Turvy, accompanied works by esteemed New Zealand artists like Billy Apple, Judy Darragh, Richard Killeen, Michael Parekowhai and Francis Upritchard. In Art News Edward Hanfling wrote that at her best, Hansen-Knarhoi has an edge over all of these artists.

This artist is fascinated by religion but is not religious, can't understand grids but uses them religiously, and takes intended insults as compliments but not, it seems, the other way around.

• Megan Hansen-Knarhoi's next exhibition, Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious is at the Mary Newton Gallery in Wellington for March. For more information visit www.mrhk.co.nz

- © Fairfax NZ News