Woollenline
Landscape, Memory, and Collective Making
2 - 30 May 2026
Pip Woolf’s artistic practice unfolds at the intersection of landscape, collective memory, and quiet ecological resistance. Rooted in drawing, yet extending into installation, film, books, and social action, her work asks how we might live— together—within fragile systems shaped by care, loss, and responsibility.
Central to Woolf’s trajectory is Woollenline (2010–2014), a landmark participatory project that brought together 1,000 individuals to repair a damaged peat bog high in the Black Mountains of Wales. Using waste wool, volunteers created long felted lines across the scorched terrain left by a catastrophic fire that had suppressed plant growth for over three decades. The project operated simultaneously as a landscape drawing, an environmental experiment, and a social structure—one that generated dialogue, unexpected reconciliation, and new modes of learning. It 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 “professional” land management, the wool felts—despite visible evidence of plant regeneration—were covered with coir and jute. For Woolf, this erasure became a catalyst for a deeper inquiry into what endures beyond material disappearance.
Pip Woolf’s submission is a revisiting of what cannot be obliterated—the experience, conversations, learning, and joy of participation.
Her current work approaches the mountain as an absent archive. Through drawing and watercolour, Woolf traces what remains unseen: the imprint of 1,000 recorded participants and the countless unmeasured connections that emerged through shared action. Watercolour functions as both material and metaphor—ideas bleeding between people, knowledge dispersing laterally, understanding formed through proximity rather than hierarchy.
Across her practice, Woolf consistently positions artistic process as a form of ethical attentiveness. She works alongside others—artists, farmers, students, politicians—allowing their worlds to inform her marks. Found colour, physical matter, and elemental forces are embedded within carefully constructed conceptual frameworks, reflecting her commitment to art as a relational, lived practice rather than a singular object or statement.
About the Artist
Pip Woolf is a visual artist whose practice is deeply rooted in landscape and community, exploring our relationship with the planet through practical, physical, emotional, political, and philosophical inquiry. With a background in environmental education and presentation, her work is underpinned by drawing, which serves as a foundational element across her artistic practice.
In 2025, Woolf was awarded the ‘Artist of the Season Winter Winner’ title by the ‘Art From Heart’ Organisation. Her creative journey includes receiving a Creative Wales Bursary from Arts Council Wales in 2002 to develop ‘Re-presenting Wool’, a film and installation. Her project ‘Marking a Point’ (2005–07) emerged from sustained observation of Welsh Assembly debates, while ‘Water Power’ (2008/09), an artist book, responded to the installation of a micro-hydroelectric scheme at her home and workplace.
A pivotal shift in her work occurred with the conception of ‘Woollenline’ in 2009, which synthesised years of observational drawing into a visual language capable of articulating subtle behaviours, power dynamics, and ecological interdependence. Currently, Woolf revisits this project as a site of memory and learning.
From 2015 onwards, her artistic exploration expanded to investigate process and identity in relation to dementia. This research has led to exhibitions across Somerset, Warrington, and Brecon, as well as the publication ‘Dementia Pronouns, Matter of Identity: I, You, We & Other’.