Working with fibre has been a lifelong motif for me, an early and enduring love for wool and angora fibre in all its many aspects. I have been a spinner and a weaver and a dyer of wool, taking from its resilient and lustrous characteristic a yearning to see it come to life, and it is this intrinsic vitality that continues to endear me to wool as a medium, and particularly its ability to be felted and  cajoled into images and textures. For what is art if not a taking up of the physical things of this world and re-ordering them into shapes and forms and textures which themselves evoke the very elements from which they have sprung?

I have spent all my years living either a village or country life, and so have never felt myself removed from the natural world. The creatures and the sky and the stars and the land which have always surrounded me infuse my inner vision with a deep thrum of the aliveness and evanescence of this world, along with a desire to honour that awareness in some physical form – to make art, to do the dance. The birds and the mountains and the fields and the sky that I seek to make come to life from my palette are the reality, and my artwork the hoped-for true reflection. It is my wish that my feltwork pieces might act as mirrors, and in that bright reflection the viewer might likewise be transported to that place where words are not needed to form the thought – merely the image itself which calls out to its subject as if to say – “Greetings – I have journeyed long and am so very pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Esther Neufeld