#feltworld

[elviraaxen]

myeahm

[fffeltworlddd-blog]

[artsinbushwick]

Fiber Renegade: Rachel McCollum’s Feltworld

by Willow Goldstein

At the northern most edge of Bushwick lies the playful world of Rachel McCollum’s imagination. Feltworld is an amorphous installation piece of shapes, forms, and colors that line the walls of McCollum’s studio. These tactile creations blur the line between abstraction and reality, freeing your mind to explore the visual landscape.

  McCollum has been working with felt for about a year now, but she was surprised at how much there was to learn about the medium, from the different types of felt to the way it wears to the thickness of the fabric. Her work in felt is influenced by her training and continuing practice as a painter. Her paintings are driven by an observation of the objects, sounds, and landscape of the city.

You can find McCollum’s work in the outside world in the form of self-coined #graffelti. “I translate what I experience in the world by putting these objects back into the environment,” says McCollum of her felted graffiti. Her creations animate spaces like a cartoon, bringing a splash of color and vitality to the oftentimes-bleak exterior of, say, industrial Bushwick. However, a dialogue about how people navigate spaces is also occurring. Thinking about the relationship between inside space and outside space lead McCollum to begin felting walls of bricks. There is a fascination in the pattern that bricks take and their role in defining our external reality.

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Feltworld is not to be missed during BOS’13! She might even give you a hand-stitched piece of #graffelti to take out in the world and animate your cityscape!