Feeling the Felt

As I visit the Smithsonian museums, I'm wishing I could get to the coolest of them all, the 

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. I've mentioned the Fashioning Felt exhibition; definitely go and visit the exhibition Web site and the Museum blog.

Artist Janice Arnold made and installed a yurt at the exhibition. From the Museum blog:   

The traditional yurt is a trellis-frame tent covered with thick, humble felts made from raw sheep’s wool. The largest, most elaborately decorated tent is the place of celebration, songs and epic poems. Arnold’s design is a fantasia on the yurt form, which is still the preferred environment for events of spiritual significance, even as nomadic peoples become more urbanized. 

Arnold will create a total environment from her luxurious handmade felts, which combine Merino wool with silk and metallic fibers and sheer fabrics. Her technique allows for the creation of richly textured areas in combination with gossamer sheer ones. The wall panels will use that sheerness to maintain the light-filled feeling of the Conservatory, while the leaded glass pattern of the ceiling inspired a mosaic of sheer and opaque areas. The window seat will be covered with a thick, dense, hand-beveled felt, to enable visitors to experience felt’s tactility and contemplate both its history and versatility. 

The fabric panels composing the walls and ceiling are so large that they have to be felted outdoors at Arnold’s studio in Centralia, Washington. Nomads felt in the spring and fall, but Arnold’s team has been working through the winter to complete the installation. Unseasonably cold temperatures coupled with record snowfall have made it challenging work indeed. But the Palace Yurt, both traditionally and in this contemporary interpretation, is the place to gather for celebration when the felting is done.

This sounds amazing, doesn't it? The sketches and samples from Arnold's sketchbook, at the yurt link above, are -- my favorite word -- fascinating, and very beautiful. Here's one:

 

sketch by Janice Arnold, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum

I found a photograph taken inside the finished yurt here, on a lovely writing and poetry blog by Patricia Markert. 

Thinking about the yurt, I couldn't help but think about the stories in the news last week of tent cities around the country, growing alarmingly fast. Nomads living in fabric houses aren't new to the world, but we've lost the skills to make and use these beautiful, safe and portable homes. It takes skill to fabricate them, imagination to beautify them, and a highly developed sense of community and mobility, I'm sure, to survive in them. 

I like the roundness of the yurt; like belly dance, it's all about powerful feminine shapes, where most of our housing and much of our movement in the West is angles and planes. 

Here's another photograph from the exhibition, with more curvaceousness. As I've mentioned before, I haven't succumbed to the felt craze, but as I see these images I think I could. I like it best when color is added, I admit, since one of felt's most appealing qualities is the ability to hold saturated, gorgeous color. 

Comments

[jude]

i would be very happy to build a house of fabric.
i think it is the density of felt that intrigues me.

[Kathleen C.]

I recall (I think on one of those housing design channels) a story on a woman who moved to the dessert and lived in a yurt. There is a company that does make and install them.
It was interesting... Hers was while technically movable, set up to be permanent, and the inside seemed comfortable and homey.
As I recall she was still happy living there after a year or so, but the dessert had presented her with some challenges. Particularly in terms of wild animals (she'd lost her cat to a large bird, and had to get two guard dogs to keep away the coyotes).

[marja-leena]

Beautiful textiles, and such an amazing project - wish I could see this!

[Lainie]

Wow Deb - that is incredible. Thank you! I'm glad it doesn't have ambient scent, though, since the smell of dirty wet wool is pretty hard to take.

Also, I realize in my post I'm totally romanticizing the whole nomadic living-in-a-yurt thing -- I'm not suggesting we should be living in yurts, just that they're very interesting feats of architecture and resourcefulness.

[deb]

You'll love this then:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ0uojUHYdA&feature=related

(the ambient sound is a great part of the charm)