ARCHIE ARTWORK JOURNEY
As our exciting journey with archibull comes to an end, we thought it would be fun to make a post showing our process and progress from the idea to the artwork.
When exploring the wool industry and our theme of field to fashion, we knew from the start we wanted to incorporate Australia’s long history with the wool industry with an avant garde take on fashion.
We decided to incorporate both Australian art history and also Australia’s long history with wool by using the painting “Shearing The Rams” by Tom Roberts - an artwork popularly seen today as an archetypal vision of Australian pastoral life. We knew we didnt want to simply paint or draw this piece onto Archie as we had bigger plans for that so we went bold and decided to latch hook a greyscale rendering of the painting as a backdrop.
latch-hooking uses a hinged hook to form a knotted pile from short, pre-cut pieces of yarn. A craftsperson creates a hooked rug by pulling lengths of cloth, usually wool, through a woven fabric, usually burlap. So basically, we set out to create a 2x3 metre carpet version of “Shearing The Rams”.
To make way for our fabulously fashionable Archie, we wanted to create a runway. We decided to use 100% wool Australian Military Blankets along with needle felting in the careers involved in getting wool from field to fashion.
Needle felting is a process which uses barbed needles to interlock wool fibers to form a more condensed material. Wool fibers have scales which when rubbed against each other catch and lock into place to create this denser material called felt.
You of course can’t have a fashion runway without a stylish model on it so to emulate the dazzling glamour of runway fashion we coated Archie in shimmering layers of pearly white acrylic paint. To then decorate her as a respectable friesian cow we used the Australian Woolmark Symbol in small clusters to represent friesian cow markings. We also used black paint to give her more standout, contrasting features (how avant garde!) and even gave her some sleek eyeliner.
Finally, the real fashion component of our Archie, the garment! We created the base of the garment using 100% wool felt using a process called wet felting.
Wet felting is one of several methods which can produce felt or mixed colour felt from wool, other animal fibres or different felt colours. Warm soapy water is applied to layers of the fibres placed at 90 degree angles to one another. Repeated agitation and compression causes the fibres to hook together into a single piece of fabric.
We felted our garment using bright, standout colours such as red, pink and magenta to stand out from the rest of the piece in greyscale. We mixed the felt colours in such a way to look like a cow hide.
We then used the same needle felting process used on the runway to create a circularly expanding design that uses the culturally artistic styles from Australia, China, India and Italy to represent our major exports of wool in trade.
When put together, these elements tell the historical story of wool in Australia from early farming practices in the late 1700s to the high fashion and mass produced clothing sent worldwide from our exports.
