A WOOL CONNECTION
Wet-felting artist working with local wool
Inspired by the matter and the material, I use wet-felting local sheep wool to research, experiment, design and communicate with a broad panel of people in a morphing network to develop a sustainable discourse and a practice of resistance.
October 2024
Temporary exhibition at Kafeeio Π, Samou 2, Mytilene
THE SENSE OF THINGS is research on coherence rooted in the context of daily life. It is the material expression of immaterial references in a healing process. As I try to make sense of things, sometimes I actively produce meaning when I repair an object or transform raw material. At other times, sense reveals itself to me, as when a figure appears in a stain. This brings a sense of spirit to my daily life and motivates my creativity.
Initiated into watercolor painting as a child and using public or private walls as my canvas, I soon chose ink as a medium and feathers as brushes. This technique allows for spontaneous and swift visual expression. For fifteen years as a musician on tour, I painted hundreds of CD covers. In recent years, I have also worked with local sheep wool, a contrasting medium that involves a lengthy, multi-stage process. I research its transformation and potentials, activate a discourse through networking, and pass on the craft of wet-felting. Restoring the value of wool makes sense.
The exhibition at Café Pi consists of nine portraits painted with ink and feathers on paper and three wall hangings made from wet-felted local wool. The works were produced between 2021 and 2024 in Mytilene.
July 2024
Together with Nesrin Ermis, mater parchement maker, founding of the Non-Profit Organisation Epimilides for the preservation of material and immaterial cultural heritage in Lesvos. In Greek mythology, the Epimeliades were nymphs protectors of the meadows and the sheep. On Lesvos Island they were called Epimilides.
Wool, a symbolic and practical connection
Applying self-sustainability, experimenting with antique techniques, up cycling and low-technologies. Focus is set on the transformation of sheep wool, the conceptual discourse and its thermo-regulative properties. Hands-on and on-site researching the transformation of the local wool by listening to rural survivors, urban planners, women and current urgencies, by reproducing ancestral gestures in ritual performances, creating poetic and useful objects, giving workshops of sudden insight and networking. I embody the wool as a human anchorage of the world I advocate and activate the discourse on the local wool in a contextual practice.
Wool is care
Wool offers a sustainable solution to improve social environment, illustrate cultural practices and strengthen culture for a healthy and habitable planet. Climate action begins at the source of the materials we choose. The transformation of the wool into its plethora of applications offers varied employment opportunities, from craft to waste management and fertilizers, from ethical farming to conscious home and fashion design. This precious material with curative properties, both physiological and psychological, can play a meaningful part in art interventions and education programs. Trans-generational and trans-cultural wool work is able to create a positive impact and true transformation in the community.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of tons of raw wool are seen as garbage around the planet. The biomass is piled up in dump yards, buried, burnt with difficulty or ends up clogging streams; a waste of energy, a biohazard for living beings. It is also a waste of prime material, since wool products have been replaced by industrial synthetic ones. Synthetic textiles are petrol-based and responsible for over a third of all microplastic found in the oceans. Between 1995 and 2015, the clothing industry increased by 400%. What does it take to make us look back to the fabric that was clothing us for so long, to understand that we are better off working with wool locally rather than importing a plastic-based overload.
Beyond the plethora of employment opportunities mirroring its applications, "beyond choosing in the reality of today, or of the past, what prepares and serves tomorrows perfect city"; wool working is trans-generational and trans-cultural; it relocates the human being with consciousness and humility in its natural and human environment. Revalorizing local wool is inevitable.
A horizontal, geographical connection exists between cultures practicing the wool processing today. Similarly, the body memory of ancestral gestures connects the makers in time vertically. The Stone Age technique bears contemporary feels and meanings.