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.

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 It is also a waste of prime material, since wool products have been replaced by industrial synthetic ones.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%. We look back to the fabric that was clothing us for so long, 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 tomorrow; 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.