By Gilbert Deglau

The chicken wire cages that Swift uses to create her masks. Photo credit: Gilbert Deglau.

I walk into the Lower School art room, and I see 15 children swarm a woman working vigorously on something on the table. Childrens’ artwork hanging in all parts of the room. Children scream as the the artist creates bubbles from rubbing soap on the piece she is working on. I am greeted by the teacher and given a spot to observe the artist and students at work.

Lower School art teachers Heather Graham and Dana Dumont recently hosted a visiting artist in their classes. Nastassja Swift is a renowned artist who works with paint and sculpture, as well as creating fabric works with felting, both wet and dry, in order to create fabulous masks, which are used for plays, performances, and as dolls.

There are two types of felting, dry felting and wet felting. Swift first showed the children how to wet felt, then later showed the process of dry felting.

Wet felting is a process that takes multiple sheets of wool and combines them to make a thinner piece of felt. Swift uses wet felting to create felt for her large-scale projects, like her elegant masks. The science behind felting is that “wool and other animal fibers have scales. When you agitate the fibers with hot water and soap, or heat them and exert pressure, the scales rub together and bond. Nothing can reverse this bonding.” (You can watch an instructional YouTube video on felting here.)

First, Swift stacked the wool sheets flat on the table, then coated them with water and soap. She proceeded to place a piece of netting over the sheets of wool and cover that with a thin sheet of plastic.

A finished felt sheet. Photo credit: Gilbert Deglau.

One of Swift’s masks, for use in a play. Photo credit: Gilbert Deglau.

Then she rubbed the wool in circular motions in order to begin the felting process, allowing the children to take part. Shrieks of laughter exploding from the children as they played with the suds from the soap. This process was repeated for both sides of the fabric, then the fabric was rolled and massaged to further felt the wool. After this, Swift showed the finished product to the class, and the original four pieces of wool had combined into one sheet of felt. Swift said that each sheet “typically takes 45 minutes to an hour to create.”

Swift creates elegant masks from sheets of felt, which she wraps around cylinders made of chicken wire, which she then morphs into the shape of a head. After creating a base layer, swift connects other pieces of wool using dry felting “to customize the look” and make them look more human. Each mask takes approximately a week and a half to create, but if she’s on a deadline she has completed one in as little time as 36 hours. All of the masks use about one and a half pounds of wool.

“When you [dry] felt wool, you’re agitating the fibers so they bond together, creating a solid fabric.” The process requires a felting needle, which is a needle with a barb on the end, used to connect one piece of wool to another by repeatedly pressing the needle through one and into the other.

Swift “prefers dry felting to wet felting, because there is much less of a mess to clean up.”

Examples of Swift’s dolls. Photo credit: Gilbert Deglau.

She showed the class one of her typical dry felting pieces, a display doll. She dry felts pieces of wool around a wire body so that the dolls are able to hold any position that she chooses. Each individual doll requires five to six hours of work, but if she is making multiple dolls at one time, she makes them in an “assembly line fashion,” first making the heads, then the body parts, and at the end finally connecting them all to create full dolls.

The first grade students enjoyed the interactive portion of her lesson, and all appeared to be very engaged with everything that Swift was teaching them. Swift created multiple pieces of felt in order to begin the creation of a mask.

The goal of the visit was to offer the children a chance to learn about “a different and fun form of art.” It also allowed the kids to learn new art forms in a “very interactive setting.”

Examples of Swift’s completed masks. Photo credit: Dana Dumont.

Photo credit: Dana Dumont.