Strongfelt

With all the felting for the piece completed, I sent all the individually worked components back to Sarah West in Raleigh. Sarah had to finish brazing the metal forms that she had left incomplete so that I could manipulate them under my sewing machine pressure foot to free-motion embroidery the felt panel on each. To protect the white felt from getting dirty as well as from burning in this process, she wrapped the felt panel in plastic first and then covered it with wet paper towels. Brilliant!

Sarah came to Asheville with all the components and we arranged them on a body form, marking which pieces would be connected together. She then returned to her studio to prong set the pieces of vinyl and to link all the components. At this point, I was leaving the country to teach workshops in Santiago, Chile and had to pass off the remaining responsibilities to her.  I am grateful for her final push to complete the piece, find an excellent model and photographer, coalesce our processes and concepts about the piece into a coherent statement and submit the work on time.

Our Artists’ Statement:

This piece uses the interplay of steel and felted wool to create a transformation of materials into a wearable protective shield. The shoulder components were created by encasing the underlying brazed steel structure in a seamless skin of wet felted wool fiber. As the felt shrunk, the forms compressed to alter their original shape, suppressing movement and sound. The work further eliminates sound by introducing pieces of vinyl from a heavy metal record. The free-motion embroidery is both inspired by the pattern of the record and the intensive energy of the music. In the act of wearing it, there is a final transformation from an individual’s natural state to one that is powerfully guarded.

When it came time to encase the large angular shoulder pieces in a continuous skin of felt, I had some trepidation as they were the largest forms I had tried to skin and were also more pointy than previous objects I had worked. I had two viable options. One option was to create a 2-D template far larger than the form to allow for the high shrinkage needed to create a thin felt skin.  I could lay the wool around the template and after initial felting I could make a cut in the skin, remove the template,  insert the metal armature, stitch up the cut and proceed with fulling the felt taut around the form. I was concerned with this method because the felt would be very delicate when I inserted the metal form in order to assure I could seal the large cut without visual evidence. I feared the points would puncture the felt.

Instead, I chose to wrap each metal shoulder armature in many layers of plastic sheeting to enlarge the surface area three-dimensionally. In this method the armature is already inside so my cut would be very small, only big enough to allow me to remove the smaller pieces of plastic one at a time. I could agitate the felt as I reduced the amount of plastic inside the skin providing space for shrinkage little by little without the metal points coming in contact with the delicate felt.  I avoided shrinking the area of the small opening to keep the felt less integrated so that when all the plastic was removed I could draw the cut closed with a basting stitch and the wool fibers would still felt together, bridging the cut.

I continued felting the skin until it was nearly fulled and taut against the metal armature. I cut two slits where I needed to have the metal exposed so that Sarah West could connect the shoulder pieces to the metal forms encircling the neck.  I then hand stitched the felt skin around the wire structure to give the form more angular definition.