Sancia Ridgeway

When design student Sancia Ridgeway first picked up a pair of knitting needles, she had no idea what she was doing. One year and countless YouTube videos later, she’s knitting like she’s been doing it all her life.  

“I think what I love about knitting is I love colours and texture, and you get to play so much with that in knitting,” says Sancia, a proud Gumbaynggirr woman and a final-year student in the UTS who is completing her Bachelor of Design (Honours) after finishing a Bachelor of Design in Visual Communication.

“It’s different to graphic design, which is what I studied, because with knitting you can turn an idea into something real quite quickly.”

This year, Sancia has produced more than 15 knitted pieces to accompany her final-year project: a book called Yarns About Blak Joy. Blak Joy is an Australian re-imagining of Black Joy, the phrase coined by Kleaver Cruz in 2015 in response to police brutality against Black people in the United States. Sancia’s project offers an emotional reprieve for First Nations people left feeling disconnected and exhausted by the 2024 Voice Referendum

“It acknowledges the collective struggles of Black people while holding space for joy as a vessel for a better future,” she says. 

Conversations about joy 

Yarns About Blak Joy explores the concept of Blak Joy through conversations with Aboriginal Australians. Each of these conversations inspired a series of knitted pieces that visually represent the person and their Blak Joys. 

The people featured in the book include UTS design academic Professor Alison Page, who spoke about her passion for passing on knowledge to younger generations and capturing songlines and nature in her creative practice, and Auntie Bea, an Elder from Sancia’s community on the mid-north coast of NSW.

“In response to my conversation with Alison, I made this knitted dress that was quite netted — she’s a saltwater woman from the La Perouse area, so it mimics where she’s from and tries to show the songlines she was speaking about,” Sancia says. 

“Auntie Bea spoke about her joy of spending time with women and connecting to country and natural dyeing. For one of her pieces, I dyed it using plant material.” 

Collectively, the work draws together Sancia’s visual communications skills with her newfound love of textiles, and it also reflects her growth as a designer over the four years of her degree, the result of subjects that pushed her to understand the theoretical foundations of design as core to her creative practice. 

These included deep explorations of equity and social justice, as well as a series of deep dives into many of the social and cultural movements that shape the world of design. 

They teach you so much about First Nations knowledges and histories, or queer histories, or feminist histories so that you have a greater understanding when you’re designing about how you can support or promote those communities in a safe and ethical way.

The bigger picture of design 

Thinking about the bigger picture of design, from social justice to climate change, research to theory to practice, has laid the foundations for a skillset that Sancia now believes can take her in countless directions. 

But the direction she really wants to go in, she says, is one that doesn’t really have a name. It’s the free-form, creative, interdisciplinary direction, one that will give her the space and the freedom to work exactly as she likes. 

With visual communication, you can go into graphic design, user interface design, exhibition curation. There’s so much you can do with it.

“You can even create your own area of visual communication, in a way — you can have your own practice that doesn’t’ really fit into a box. That’s what I want to do — I want to start my own practice, be able to do my own business, express myself in more than one medium,” Sancia says.