For the Love of Felt

BFA Student

Major: Ceramics

Graduation Year: 2018

Artist Statement:

Through the process of felting I am reconnecting and revisiting my most cherished locations from around the world, adorning my body with light, colorful, and flamboyant jewelry that captures aspects from each place. Grey clouds that coat Poland during the winter, the lemon tree in my grandparents’ garden in Italy as well as the Florentine designs I grew up admiring. Calla lilies in my mother's garden, inspired poetry written by my father, and Nantasket Beach where my family and I go on vacation. By adorning my body with colorful jewelry inspired by those places, I become a living map of my experiences; each memory, each scar, each pattern, a symbol of my identity. I chose felt because of its role as a natural buffer between the softness of the body and harder surfaces like metals, plastics and resins, much in the way that thatch grows atop peat bogs between the warm, organic core of the earth and the cold, hard exterior elements. I want to take wool, a natural, renewable, affordable fiber and go beyond its practical, ecological, and utilitarian uses to create art that can be worn and used and passed on to the next generation. I want to create healing art, and heal through art.