Inside This New York Artist’s Felt Studio

Why It Matters

The artist’s fusion of scientific visual data with hand‑crafted felt expands the dialogue between art and empirical inquiry, positioning craft as a conduit for exploring truth and attracting a new class of interdisciplinary collectors.

Key Takeaways

• Artist creates large-scale wool sculptures inspired by scientific imagery.
• Works blend personal memory with MRI and histology visuals.
• Needle-felting technique uses barbed needles for precise layering.
• Recent series incorporates space imagery and mixed-media elements.
• Artistic focus explores truth through scientific and sculptural processes.

Summary

The video offers a tour of a New York‑based artist’s studio where she produces monumental felted wool works that read like visual research papers. Her practice pivots on translating scientific data—MRI scans, histological slices, and even astronomical photographs—into tactile, color‑rich sculptures, treating the felted medium as a painter’s palette.

She explains that each piece begins with a personal narrative, often recalling childhood memories that clash with family recollections, prompting a fascination with subjective truth. Using a suite of custom‑made tools and barbed needle felting needles, she builds the surface in perpendicular layers, alternating wet‑felt and needle‑felt techniques to achieve depth and texture. The process is described as both sculptural and image‑making, merging tactile construction with visual representation.

A notable example is a 2016‑2017 hybrid sculpture that combined ceramics with a long felted sash, illustrating her willingness to blend media. The newer series draws on space imagery, reworking a previously discarded piece into a fresh composition that juxtaposes cosmic motifs with the intimate scale of wool.

By marrying scientific imagery with handcrafted craft, the artist challenges conventional notions of authenticity and invites collectors to consider how truth is constructed across disciplines. Her work signals a broader trend where makers leverage data‑driven concepts to expand the narrative potential of traditional media, potentially reshaping market expectations for contemporary craft.

Original Description

Meet Pauline Shaw at her New York studio. Primarily working with felted wool, she builds images through a process closer to sculpture than to painting. Drawing from MRI scans and cellular imagery, her compositions move between the microscopic and the cosmic. For Pauline, the work is a way of making memory tangible—layered fibers and hand-built surfaces materialize what’s otherwise constantly shifting.

You can find her work soon in Hong Kong on view at ArtHouse Tai Hang. The new contemporary art festival runs from March 21-25, 2026.

ArtHouse Tai Hang

Mar 21–25, 2026

Hong Kong 🇭🇰