© Allison Currie 2013
I started getting into needle felting recently when I wanted to do sculpture without resorting to the expense of taking up ceramics. I have a history of an interest in how items from the craft world translate into the art world. So of course, I did some Googling to see if other artists had also gone this route. While most of what I found were (adorable) felted toys more in the crafts category, I came across an artist that blew me away and inspires me greatly.
Fiber artist Stephanie Metz creates surreal and highly skilled needle felting sculptures featuring "overbred" domestic animals, organic structures in bones and flesh, and teddy bear anatomy.
Fiber artist Stephanie Metz creates surreal and highly skilled needle felting sculptures featuring "overbred" domestic animals, organic structures in bones and flesh, and teddy bear anatomy.
Her series Overbred Animals is a disconcerting reflection on our distance from animals we eat, our loss of identity as a fellow mammal, and a reflection on the dystopian discomfort that comes from bio-engineering and genetic modification. Animals that are developed as food sources vary between those developing humanized appendages, and those stripped of their species identity. Muscle Heifer is a walking knot of animal flesh that I can't even imagine how it would sustain itself in any normal fashion, and stirs my mind to disturbing images of beasts growing in pools of nutritional fluids or hooked up to tube feeds. Yikes. Meanwhile Milk Cow is a more gentle piece: a dairy cow with four human breasts for udders who retains her identity. She could easily be a fertility fetish; it seems obvious to me her ties to motherhood and the bounty of life-sustaining mother's milk.