Felt marks an early stage in an ongoing investigation into making as a way of encountering the world. These works explore place as an entanglement of materials, histories, ecologies, and temporalities - what Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject. Looking back, this body of work established many of the questions that continue to shape my practice: the reality of things beyond perception, the agency of materials, and making as a way of knowing a world that always exceeds us.

Hyperobjects:  The concept of the hyperobject comes from Object-Oriented Ontology, a philosophical position that understands the world as composed of objects nested within other objects—a table, a river, a city, global warming, a set of policies. Objects reveal themselves only through their relationships with other entities, taking on different qualities depending on who or what they encounter.

"An object is and is not itself at the same time, because it has parts that cannot be wholly subsumed into it.... A flock of birds on a lake is a unique entity, yet it is also a part of a series of hyperobjects: the biosphere, evolution, global warming."

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

Every object possesses a reality that remains withdrawn from the world and can never be fully accessed. We never encounter things in their entirety; we know them only indirectly, through their manifestations and relationships. According to OOO, art offers one way of entering that oblique relationship.

Timothy Morton developed the concept of the hyperobject to describe entities that extend so broadly through time and space that they exceed ordinary human experience and perception. Hyperobjects are viscous, non-local, and exist within what he calls high-dimensional phase space. They reveal themselves only where their trajectories intersect with our own.

Place:  A place is a location, but it is also the weather, the climate, and the biosphere. It is the local landscape, but also geological processes unfolding over deep time, the weathering of land, and the interactions of humans, animals, plants, air, and water. A place is the people who inhabit it, but also politics, industries, farms, and the networks through which food, goods, and resources circulate. A place is a specific spot along a creek, but also the entire watershed, the rivers, the oceans, the groundwater, and ultimately all of Earth's water.

Place is viscous because there is no way of escaping it. It is simultaneously local and non-local because it is, in Morton's terms, an object wrapped within objects, wrapped within objects. Its weather extends into global atmospheric systems, its politics into global politics, its ecology into planetary processes. Place exists in a high-dimensional phase space; it is too extensive in time and space to be comprehended in its entirety. Different aspects of it are revealed only as they intersect with our own lives.

Wool and Felt:  Wool is inherently of the place. It comes from an animal that eats, drinks, and breathes within a particular landscape.

Felt is the essential smooth space - the anti-fabric described by Deleuze and Guattari. It has no warp or weft. Its fibers are entangled rather than woven. It has no beginning or end, no top or bottom, no center. It is continuous, extending in every direction.

The process of making felt relies on water, heat, pressure, and friction. It builds upon the inherent characteristics of sheep's wool—its crimp, elasticity, and creep. Moisture causes the fibers to swell and open their scales, allowing them to entangle with one another. Heat, pressure, and friction intensify that entanglement, causing the fibers to shrink together into a new material. Throughout the process, the thickness, shape, and scale of the felt continue to change.

It is precisely this process of transformation that drew me to felt. The material does not simply receive form; it emerges through the interaction of material forces. The work is made not by imposing an image upon matter, but by entering into a negotiation with the behavior of wool, water, heat, and time.