Moxie Lieberman Creates a System of Mechanisms Out of Wool in ‘Control’

Seattle-based artist Moxie Lieberman spent a year “needle felting” to create “Control,” a system of gadgets comprised entirely of wool. The process comes from transforming wool fiber into felt with the use of barbed needles. The artist creates “unusually dense, solid, self-supporting” structures with this method, which takes several, several hours.











The artist doesn’t use water or molds to accomplish this, as she details in the FAQ section of her website. The only time any outside material was used in “Control was the yellow desk and green block, which were felted around foam.

“I make sculptures out of soft materials and hard feelings,” Lieberman says, in a statement. “It’s a survival-response, an attempt to deeply examine and express pain and wonder, in order to discover what’s universal.”

The artist’s work has been shown in galleries across the U.S., from Seattle and Los Angeles to New York. In other works, she implements embroidery, cross-stitching, e-textiles, and other methods.





In series like “Icons & Toems & Pieces of the Past,” the arists looks beyond gadgets and at keepsakes from yesterday. Animal crackers, matches, and an Etch-a-Sketch are among the items depicted.The artist says that series was inspired by “murky, fragmented memories we count on to tell ourselves our personal stories.”