Ocean – Artist’s Explanation Ocean is a self-portrait, sculpted slowly and deliberately from wool that I washed, picked, and dyed by hand. Every strand carries the memory of the sheep it came from, the land it grew on, and the long tradition of humans shaping fiber into meaning. Wool is one of the oldest materials on Earth that we’ve worked with, and no matter where people lived—deserts, mountains, coastlines, or forests—they all learned to spin, weave, felt, and stitch. Cultures separated by oceans found the same comfort in wool.
I feel that every time I sit down to make a piece. It is like opening a door to every ancestor who ever worked with their hands. Ocean was born through both wet-felting and needle-felting, a merging of ancient techniques. Her hat was created through wet-felting, using warm water, soap, and pressure—just as people have done for thousands of years to shape garments, armor, and sacred objects. The face was needle-felted slowly, with thousands of tiny stabs binding loose fibers into form. It is an intuitive, meditative process, sculpting emotion out of a material that already knows how to hold stories.
Her colors mirror the sea—layers of turquoise, violet, indigo, and storm-blue. Her hair curls like deep-sea plants drifting in unseen currents. She carries a mask across her eyes, reddened from weeping, and a single tear shaped like a broken heart.
Ocean mourns the world as it is right now—the division, the cruelty, the ease with which people turn on one another. She is a reminder that feeling deeply is not a weakness; it is the place where healing begins.
When I create with wool, I feel connected to something timeless. Something older than language. Something that binds people across continents and centuries. Ocean is part of that lineage—a modern expression of a craft rooted in the past, carrying both grief and hope in her small but powerful form.