Le Fil Pastorale

10.12.25 - 30.01.26.

Download list of available work here.

Julia Mottram makes wool panels with just water, wool and bars of soap from Marseille. 

The exquisite simplicity of these ingredients, belie the rigour and complexity of the artistic process. There is much at play: a variety of wool, an ancient technique and a preoccupation with man’s profligacy and impact on Mother Earth.

Le Fil Pastorale in English means ‘the pastoral thread,’ and the exhibition is so called because Julia’s work honours wool for it’s utility (the origin of all woollen thread) and idyllic origin. The title suggests that close attention to wool- which Mottram’s work intends to inspire- can initiate a connection, or ‘fil’, between the ancient, bucolic world of snoozing Greek shepherds and our own modern one.

Julia undertakes the slow, old process of wet felting entirely by hand, in a manner unchanged for millennia. Through this laborious work, she gains a primeval sense of industry, industry that is wrought by hand, without tools, out of natural materials. This physical work, along with Julia’s innovative use of raw, unprocessed wool, generates questions about man’s use of Mother Nature and the panels are often referred to as woollen landscapes in which the felted ground is the farmland, and the buoyant vigour of the raw wool relief, the wild, wooded uplands in which Pan’s flute can still be heard.

Julia’s practise began in 2015, when she was dismayed to learn that the fleeces from her flock in the Loire Valley were a waste product and would be buried.  From this point, Mottram has learnt to use wool that would otherwise go to waste, investing the raw material she so loves with the form and strength of her art.