RESEARCH-CREATION · WOOL · 2026
Sheep Portrait
20 panels · 15 individual Ontario sheep · approximately 1 × 1 m
Wool/Spinning, Knitting, Weaving, Corchet, Tufting
Every material began with an individual sheep
Origin
Wool can become anonymous very quickly. Once a fleece is washed, processed, spun, and turned into textile, it can be easy to forget that the material once belonged to an individual animal, raised by a farmer in a particular place.
For this project, I wanted to keep that connection visible.
The fleeces were sourced directly from Ontario farmers. Many of the farmers also shared photographs of the sheep the wool came from. I processed each fleece by hand, from raw wool to fibre and yarn, and used the sheep’s own material to recreate its image.
Each panel therefore begins with a real relationship between an animal, a farmer, a material, and a place.
Letting the material shape the process
Transformation
I didn’t want every fleece to be forced into exactly the same textile structure. As I worked with the materials, their differences influenced how I approached each part of the portrait.
Knitting allowed me to work with handspun yarn while building areas of colour, texture, and surface stitch by stitch.
Weaving created another relationship between yarn and image, allowing differences in thickness, texture, and colour to become part of the structure.
Crochet gave me more freedom to build shapes and textured details, particularly where the image needed a more irregular or dimensional surface.
Tufting allowed fibre and yarn to remain more visibly wool-like, creating depth and surfaces that echo the texture of fleece.
More than a material study
Relationships
Sheep → Farmer → Fibre → Maker → Community → Public
Working with wool from individual sheep made it difficult to think of the material as simply a commodity. Every fleece came with an origin: an animal, a farmer, a farm, and the labour involved in raising and handling it. I became another person in that chain as I processed the fibre and transformed it into textile.
By bringing these materials together into one portrait, I wanted to make some of those relationships visible again.
The work asks viewers to encounter wool not only as a finished textile material, but as something that has moved through many hands, places, and forms before reaching them.
Sheep Portrait
20 panels · 15 individual Ontario sheep · 2026
Ontario-grown wool, processed and transformed by hand.
Making the origin visible
Reflection
The Breed Study Book allows someone to touch and compare wool directly. Sheep Portrait does something different.
It gives the material an identity.
By placing each sheep’s fleece back into an image of the animal it came from, the work makes origin visible in a way that a fibre sample alone cannot. The differences between the fleeces are still present, but they are no longer only material characteristics to compare. They belong to individual animals and are connected to farmers, places, and the work involved in producing them.
For me, the portrait became a way of asking what changes when we know where a material came from, and who it came from.