May Exhibition: Woollenline by Pip Woolf

Our May Exhibition this year is Woollenline by Pip Woolf

Opening Saturday 2nd May, 2pm

Exhibition Dates: Saturday 2nd May to Saturday 30th May

Palimpsest-what remains?

What is the learning between what is erased and what is left behind

My artistic practice unfolds at the intersection of landscape and a quiet ecological sensibility and with institutional resistance. Rooted in drawing, yet extending into installation, film, books, and social action, my work enquires how we might live together within the fragile and evolving systems of our world.I work alongside others, artists, farmers, students, politicians allowing their worlds to inform my marks. Found colour, physical matter, and elemental forces are embedded within carefully constructed conceptual frameworks, reflecting commitment to art as a relational, lived practice rather than a singular object or statement. As a visual artist with a background in environmental education and presentation, my practice is profoundly influenced by landscape and community, an exploration of our place on the planet. Drawing underpins all aspects of my work.

Palimpsest-what remains? reflects on the1,000 recorded participants involved in making earlier work Woollenline (2010-14). It considers the countless unmeasured connections that emerged through shared action. My recent work uses watercolour as metaphor to describe ideas bleeding between people, knowledge dispersing laterally and understanding formed through proximity rather than hierarchy. In this way, where two colours intersect to create a third, so too when people exchange knowledge and ideas new possibilities arise that could not previously have been imagined.

My use of the three colours in the current work, Prussian blue, Raw Sienna and Burnt Sienna is critical to finding an expression of the physical site of Woollenline.

Woollenline was a landmark participatory project which brought together 1,000 individuals to repair a damaged peat bog high in the Black Mountains of Wales. Using waste wool, volunteers created lines of felt across the scorched and barren terrain left by a catastrophic fire. The project operated simultaneously as a landscape drawing, an environmental experiment, and a social structure. It generated dialogue, unexpected reconciliation and new modes of learning. The work received international recognition and awards, yet its most profound impact was experiential: the relationships formed and the collective knowledge embedded in the act of making.

In 2022, Woollenline was physically erased. In the name of conservation and more conventional land management, the wool felts, despite visible evidence of enabling plant regeneration, were covered with coir and jute.

This erasure has become a catalyst for my current work, a deeper inquiry into what endures beyond material disappearance: a revisiting of what cannot be obliterated, the experience, conversations, learning, and joy of participation.