A few months back I was passing Vermillion art gallery and wine bar in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle (my home base), and was pulled inside like a tractor beam toward the work of Zoë Williams. Her mounted zoomorphic felt creatures are something right out of The Secret Art of Dr. Suess (one of my all-time favorite books by one of my all-time favorite artists) or right out of her wicked subconscious, as she attributes her active dream-life for inspiration. As an artist myself, and an impatient one at that, I'm fascinated by the physical process she uses, described below from her website:
Recent work is constructed using a dry felting technique, known as needle felting, in which a barbed needle is used to shape and mold wool fibers into sculptural forms. Needle felting is a very slow and painstaking process; the carded wool is pierced hundreds of times to lock the fibers together and create a solid object. No armatures are used; each piece is solid wool with the exception of additions like glass eyes, lenses and beads, and the wood plaques/frames on which some pieces are mounted.
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| Show poster for Zoë Williams at Ghost Gallery |
In our recent Hallways visit to Ghost Gallery for Vivarium: Jewelry Installation, I was lucky to again come across some of Zoë's work (and yet be disappointed that we had just missed her solo exhibition there). It is my intention to at some point own an original Zoë Williams. Just sayin'....
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| The Fates by Zoë Williams |
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| Andulovian Grackler by Dr. Suess (1934) |
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| Semi-Normal Green-Lidded Fawn by Dr. Suess (1934) |
*Dr. Suess used real animal parts (antlers, hornbill) to create his plaster sculptures mounted here on wood. Mind you, this was in the 1930's. My hero.
Wow, that is really neat!
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