weaving and felt
When felt meets basketry,
wool draws its strength from the plant world without losing any of its softness.
Wool felt and basketry
Two traditional techniques extend research initiated around the fusion of knitting and felt. From then on, there was only one step from knitting to braiding, taken to open a new creative field with wool felt as the common thread.
The new pieces, woven using different basketry techniques, are made of felted wool stems.
Here, wool borrows the strength of willow without losing its softness, and the suppleness of the textile then composes with the tension of the vegetal.
This diversion of material — replacing traditional weaving fibres with felted wool — blurs familiar references and perceptions, creating a subtle, unsettling ambiguity.
The memory of the gesture
In this project, I seek to give the textile a new kind of presence: a living fabric that holds itself, retaining the form shaped by the gesture, as if it remembered the hand. Through it, I explore the threshold where textile ceases to be fluid and pliant to become volume, sculpture, and imprint.
The felt stems are entirely hand-felted. They are reinforced with a metallic thread, bringing their quality closer to that of plant fibers. Some are then dyed with plants and braided using a traditional basketry technique.
The resulting fabric is then folded, pleated or draped, and permanently retains the shapes it has been given.
