Knitting Echoes

Knitting Echoes is a kinetic sculpture conceived by Toronto-based artist Ailin Dong: a ring of articulated wooden arms carrying knitted textile, moving as one slow, breathing body.

Dong developed the concept and visual language of the work. DFFF was commissioned to bring it into the physical world — translating the artist’s sketches into a buildable structure, developing the electronics and motion system, fabricating the components and assembling the finished sculpture for exhibition.

Our role

Structural design · Electronic development · Fabrication · Assembly. The completed work travelled to Canada and was exhibited at Stantec Window Gallery, Toronto, in 2025.

Knitting Echoes is the studio’s first external commission, and it set the pattern for how DFFF approaches commissioned fabrication: the artist’s authorship stays intact from first sketch to finished sculpture, and the studio’s work is to make that authorship buildable — structurally sound, mechanically reliable and true to the drawings it started from.

Process

The commission ran the full cycle of the studio’s practice — art fabrication from sketch to exhibited work. Dong’s drawings set the form and the character of the movement; DFFF worked backwards from them to something that could be built: resolving the geometry of the articulated wooden arms, designing the mechanics that let the ring move as one slow body, developing the motor control and custom electronics, then fabricating the components and assembling the finished sculpture before it travelled to Canada for exhibition.

Fidelity is the measure of success in this kind of work. The finished piece had to move the way the sketches implied — the breathing quality of the textile, the pace of the arms — so structural and electronic decisions were made in service of the drawing rather than around it, and the engineering stays invisible inside the artwork.

In the space

Stantec Window Gallery faces the street, and Knitting Echoes was shown there as a window display: a kinetic sculpture performing to passers-by rather than to visitors who have chosen to walk into a room with it.

That setting shaped the engineering. A window display cannot rely on an operator standing beside it: whether behind retail glass or in a gallery window like this one, the work has to run unattended, and keep running, quietly and reliably, for the length of the show. Structure, electronics and motion system were developed with those demands in mind.

For the studio, the project shows what kinetic window installations can be when they are engineered rather than improvised — the same discipline of structure, electronics and fabrication that drives DFFF’s in-house machines, applied to a sculpture behind glass. It remains the studio’s only external commission to date, and it stands as the template for the next one: an artist’s drawing at one end, a finished, exhibited work at the other.