Foreign Wool
2023
Shetland Islands, Scotland
Performance with roving (unspun) wool, lichen, grass, straw, twine
Can learning what this place grows tell me whether I belong to it or visiting it?
I spent weeks alone in Shetland, knitting a wool shawl with raw fleece. It still held bits collected from fields: lichen, dirt, and peat. I made a Skekler hat from straw, the trickster of local guising tradition, the original trick-or-treater in disguise. A character began to emerge: part wool, part straw, part longing.
She roamed the knowes above the North Sea. Or I did. The camera followed as evidence that she existed, that I existed, that something was there.
She wasn't a bridge to belonging. Or I wasn't. I can't knit myself into belonging. Sometimes being foreign is the truth and the yearning itself is what I carry home.
Photographs by Sean Sweeney