Drawing and stitching. The Idea of the North at 210 Gallery an artist run gallery in Brooklyn NY

The idea of the north works by Cyrilla Montzer and her statement about her work.
Pencil on industrial wool felt hand sewn with silk thread.

Work with Felt 2006-'08

Would I had seen a white bear! (for how can I imagine it?)

I have been pondering this absurd statement from Gertrude Stein’s The Life and Opinions
of Tristram Shandy. In confronting the ridiculous, I am motivated to make work.

It is also true that a small wooden polar bear has found its way to my worktable in the last
year. It had belonged to my Aunt Fritzi, who got it in Alaska. Polar bears are solitary
creatures. They traverse continents, working their way to becoming extinct.

The first three-dimensional body of work I made with cream-colored industrial wool felt
was titled Polar Bear Glove Song. The felt is close to the color of polar bear fur and
reminds me of snow, a bear’s natural habitat. Both insulate and make quiet.

Like Polar Bear Glove Song and the freestanding More saints seen, the new felt pieces in

the warm snow series are stitched together by hand with lustrous pale grey silk thread.
And like the earlier work, the new three-dimensional pieces are self-supporting; there are
no armatures or additional supporting materials. The new pieces, however, are larger,
increasingly rectilinear, and closer to the ground. As a group they form a 'settlement' of
building blocks, each a necessary aspect of a collective whole. The new series has also
begun to include flag and banner-like wall pieces in which shapes are cut out and then
inlaid (and stitched) into position not unlike marquetry. They are a means to mark the
territory.

Felt is a non-woven textile made from the compression of a tangle of animal fur and
behaves in unpredictable ways. To sew it into geometric forms or to stitch shapes within
eachother is to go against its natural inclination to buckle, stretch, droop, and torque
(which brings in an element of chance). I am attempting to push felt to do what it doesn’t
want to do while maintaining its integrity as a material.


www.cyrillamozenter.com

Felted Wool Sculptures - Stephanie Metz

Needle felting is mostly a craft making technique; a smaller scale of how industrial wool felt is produced. In industrial production thousands of felting needles mat wool into a flat, uniform and dense fabric. This same technique can be done by hand with one needle creating diferent forms or three-dimensional objects. The technique is labourious and usually one where you are sure to get your fingers pinned over and over by the felting needles which are long, barbed and extremely sharp as to allow the fibers to mix and bond.

Felted Wool sculptures made by needle felting is the latest work of Stephanie Metz, a northern bay californian artist. Her skill at this technique stems out of a talent that has been worked out and developed by practice. Different media have been approached in her training and experience; printmaking, painting (fossil studies, landscape, citylandscape), figure drawing and sculpture.

Teddy Bear Natural History, Overbred Animals and Animal Studies are the titles of these Felted Wool series of works. A certain death smell is presented yet the nature of the material makes it ambigious and contradictory; the senses and the mind get puzzled while confronted with these cozie aberrations of nature.

Danger, mutations and overbreed animals along with teddy bear skulls are portrayed in Metz´s anatomical studies. Wool itself a natural fiber grown from sheep holds some of the mystery of this uneasiness; as abnormal or deformed fauna are created out of animal hair and not a petrified material like marble, stone or bronce. Solid yet pourous and slightly furry these figurative and realistic representations appear as classic anatomical studies and traditional sculptures that while preserving some of the correct proportions and beauty notions challenge those same notions by presenting them in abnormal transformations of excess or lack.

Teddy Bear Natural History confronts the image of childhood and death. Death itself can be played with and understood of as a natural process present even in the imaginary life of a stuffed toy. This particular work shares some lines along with the current japanese boom of deathly but cute dolls and toys but also brings out a relationship with the stuffed animals kept for conservation in museums, getting them so close as to bring out a sense of uneasiness with the teddy bear toys used in everyday life by kids; deprived of their own cycles and treated as petrified animals for play presenting themselves as normality, security and immortality. Metz presents them as bones; the end of their life cycle as petrified stuffed creatures.

While appealing to the senses the pieces confront your tactile instict with the realization of the subjects as freak, awkard and contrary to life. Whether abnormal cycles of nature or genetic mutations produced synthethically one is confronted with natures order of things shifted and therefore our own order of things along with our role and participation within nature.

www.artbysteph.com