Valérie Wartelle is a contemporary fibre artist whose main fascination lies within the manipulation of textiles and fibres as an expressive art form. She is an award-winning artist working and living in West Yorkshire. Her work is held in private collections in Canada, France, Greece, Switzerland, USA, and the UK.
The rural environment serves as her inspiration, and using wet felting is her primary practice. Valérie explores long-term interests of texture, colour, and layering to create contemplative and ethereal wall hung pieces. These are highly textured artworks in which cloth is embedded, prints disguised and threads unravelled as a painter with her brush.
Explorative and experimental work has always been at the heart of Valérie’s creative practice. In her latest work, she has been seeking a more incidental and intuitive expression in large-scale work and more dynamic mark making. Inspired by her mixed media paintings, Valérie has created her largest felt pieces to date. Aware that the sheer physicality of the task alone would be demanding, the making is muscular and rhythmic as she executes the steps again and again – place, spray, roll, squeeze, stretch. “It seems repetition nudges me into a meditative space”, she explains. “It invites me to trust myself, and let the haptic connections sinuously paint a new space for the viewer to contemplate.”