2022
20 x 80 x 220 cm.
Icelandic wool with collected garbage, felted in Iceland outdoors, next to small streams.
Also Film Felting on the Rocks
Exhibition: Quo Vadis, National Art Museum, Riga, Latvia during Riga Textile and Fibre Art Triennial 2023.

CONCEPT: QUO VADIS by Mariëlle van den Bergh

Currently I am staying at the residency “ARTAK 350” in West Iceland. Yesterday night we had a storm with wind speeds exceeding 130 km/h. Here, as elsewhere, the weather is getting more and more extreme. I made the work “Felting on the Rocks” at the residence, for which I used Icelandic wool. Nowadays sheep shearers in the Netherlands have to pay to get rid of their wool, which nobody wants to have anymore! Wool is a high-quality product and traditionally one of the best ways to keep warm in cold times. I want to upgrade the image of wool and make interesting, hip art works from wool, visualizing the raw, primal nature of Iceland. In this work I combined the wool with construction waste I collected around the residency house. There also is a film, showing how I felted wool on the rocks, next to a stream in the wild Icelandic landscape.