Painting with Wool by Cornelia Koch / Stop-Motion documentation by Josh Messer
Formally trained as a designer, I use my skills of conceptual expression, composition, color, aesthetics and materials, yet roam freely in often unexpected territories, and so I developed a new technique: painting with wool.
Working with wool, I am exploring the space where impressionism and abstract expressionism meet: through interpretations of color, composition and texture. I am interested in creating meaning through emotions, aiming to spark energy, positivity and joy, but also contrast and tension. I am interested in creating a natural presence of energy. I literally dance on my wool paintings in order to merge the fibers with soap water. This energy is visually embedded in each work, through the motion of fibers in many different hues. It can be touched. It can be walked on. It gets better with time.The wool I use is natural sheep wool, hand dyed in many vibrant shades, sometimes mixed with silk, cotton yarn, bamboo fiber and alpaka wool from animals I know by first name. The process of creating such a ‘natural artwork’ is meditative, intuitive and physical, yet it requires a lot of planning and interpreting what I envision into a complex fluffy composition, which is transformed into a dense single layer through the process of wet felting.
Painting with wool requires a fresh way of seeing, combined with a very physical, intuitive technique to translate the imagined into a composition that is, through the wet felting process, transformed like alchemy into its final form. Layers of color, detail and direction move, merge and melt into substance. Compositions emerge, drawn with soft organic fibers and turned into a one of a kind, dynamic, colorful, warm and natural medium.
But comfort is only comfortable for a while. Then it's time to switch to something else: clay, wax, paper, photography, collage, 'mixed media'– sometimes from the side of the road... new ideas, new experiments, new insights, new joy.