Saturday, March 22, 2014

wool...but wood

work for Wood and Wool Exhibition. 
Wood & Wool is a Romanian Design Week project, a pop-up exhibition held at Romanian Cultural Institute in Stockholm, between 6 of February and 8 of March 2014. The exhibition was made possible in collaboration with The Romanian Cultural Institute in Stockholm, with the support of The Romanian Peasant Museum.


I was inspired by the theme-Wool and Wood- to create two necklaces of wool, but with an idea of wood.  During my research on wood fibers,( I thought of them when they are trapped in sheets of paper as they would be seen under the microscope), I discovered tangled, chaotic threads, with apparently no logic. All we usually see is the final product, the paper. White, smooth paper, with no impurities.  Every now and then it happens that we see a brown spot. But when we dig deeper, we see them, naughty, unequal fibers.  Nobody can see the empty space in between. Nobody usually thinks what’s beneath this white façade. But then again, nobody believes that buildings are one layer of paint and that’s it. No. We all know that walls are made out of bricks and mortar. But we all must be aware of what’s behind all the things that surround us.  

So I used wool fibers to create an over-sized piece of paper. Not an imitation, but rather my view of it.  It’s a tribute to the lovely wood and to the much needed sheet of paper. Wool is not just the mean to achieve my final goal, the jewelry. Wool fibers have their own personality. They are hard to domesticate, to restrain in a rigid form.  So the result is always surprising. Some fibers will never be domesticated and so, the paper will be fluffy. The fibers are not always white, and so, the paper will be colored.  Wool fibers cannot create perfect shapes and so, the paper will be textured (as it actually is). But in any case, wool is perfect…