Absence, the highest form of presence.

— James Joyce

Woolnerable

2024—

Textile collage

Unprocessed sheep wool, burlap, reclaimed fabric, found objects, salvaged wood

Photos by LelleFotografie

This body of work is an ongoing research into the expressive potential of unprocessed sheep wool —both material and metaphor— deliberately detached from its inherited rural and domestic narratives. It unfolds as a tactile dialogue with absence and the ontology of grief.

Although the pieces recall the sequential logic of the Via Crucis, the reference is non-religious. I use its structure —a path composed of stations— as a framework to depict the psychological stages of grief. Each work functions as a point of tension, weight, rupture or transition. In this context, wool, burlap, reclaimed fabric, found objects and salvaged wood operate as archetypal carriers of burden, fragility and endurance. Here the use of fabric draws on the logic of the shroud: a surface meant to receive, wrap and shelter. The result is a material mapping of grief: not a theological narrative, but a constellation of emotional thresholds shaped through matter.

While the series was not conceived as site-specific, the background space didn’t remain neutral. It held the works, answered them back, and aligned its own elemental qualities with their material presence.

What emerged was a brief reciprocity: the works grounding the space, the space amplifying the works, until boundaries dissolved and the environment became part of the piece rather than its backdrop — not objects documented, but entities revealed.