IN RESONANCE WITH THE EARTH
This section of the journal contains poetry and prose, fine art, photography, multimedia, and other creative products reflecting our relationship with the world of nature. In this issue, this section includes an artwork and an essay by Merve Kurt.
REMEMBERING TRHOUGH FELT
Merve Kurt
is a PhD researcher in Psychology, University of Dundee, Scotland-UK. She is an interdisciplinary researcher, poet, artist, and practitioner working at the intersection of expressive arts, ecological thought, and social justice. She holds graduate degrees in social sciences and humanities, and her current research explores ecopoiesis, posthumanism, and cinematic aesthetics. With over a decade of experience working with international NGOs and in community-based humanitarian projects, she integrates critical theory with creative practice to examine human–nature relations, ethical aesthetics, and the healing potential of art. Her poetic and visual works reflect a commitment to more-than-human narratives, affective ecologies, and transformative imaginaries.
Abstract
This text reflects on felt-making as an embodied and material way of approaching memory. Developed over approximately two years through wet felting and needle felting, the work is shaped by interruption, return, and gradual transformation. Rather than treating memory as a fixed content that simply comes from the past, the text understands remembering as a layered and shifting process, formed within the present through affect, bodily states, and material engagement. The resulting image, an abstracted tree form emerging through fibrous textures and earth-based colours, is read not as a planned representation but as a structure close to memory itself. Through its hidden roots, the time it holds, its many branches, and its scarred surface, the tree calls to mind the layered and interconnected nature of personal and collective memory. Grounded in perspectives of embodiment and material engagement, the text proposes that actively participates in the processes of thinking and feeling. In this sense, the work proposes felt as a material field through which body, memory, and matter become entangled.
Keywords: embodiment, felt-making, art practice, cultural memory
In my artistic practice, ceramics, felt, fabric, photography, embroidery, marbling paper, poetry and the body through yoga have each opened up to me at different periods of my life with different needs. Looking back, I read these orientations not as a matter of medium choice but as the body’s own knowledge searching for its way among materials. As if each period required a different surface, a different resistance, a different mode of contact. Sometimes the weight of clay, sometimes the memory of fabric, sometimes the repetition of stitching, and sometimes the inner rhythm opened by breath within the body. For this reason, my relationship with material was, before being an aesthetic decision, perhaps a search for a form appropriate to lived experience.
The felt work I shared within this call also emerged, took shape and reached its final form from a similar search. Over a process that extended across approximately two years, I first began with wet felting, then I stepped away from the work, waited, left it, and later returned to it by working on the surface with needle felting. At the beginning, this pause was one of the constitutive parts of the work. The fact that this work extended over two years was the way in which the specific temporality of memory became visible within the material. A process that did not end where it began, that remained suspended and that was returned to later with a different state of mind and a different body was close to the non-linear, layered, interrupted and recursive nature of remembering. In this sense, remembering was not something that simply came from the past. It was often the process of understanding and making sense of the past from the present, where the past appeared as something shifting, fluid and shaped by current emotions and affective states. The past was not fixed or stable. What is remembered today differs from what was remembered yesterday or what will be remembered tomorrow. Perhaps in remembering the past, today may become clearer than yesterday and tomorrow clearer than today.
The image that emerged appeared to me as a kind of abstracted treeness together with a fibrous field woven through colours close to soil, leaves, moss, dryness, shadow and light. This work also coincided with a period in which I spent long times in nature, often photographing tree trunks and roots, and in which the image of the tree frequently appeared in my poetry. It was also intertwined with my doctoral process in which I think about how cultural memory and identity emerge through art. In this sense, working with felt became a way of turning toward a material that called me from within collective and cultural memory. Felt here became a way of touching memory, approaching it and thinking through the body, and this process did not develop through direct intention but rather called me from a bodily place rather than a mental one.
From the perspective of embodiment, this orientation becomes more meaningful for me. The art therapy literature emphasises that in the process of art making, body and mind are not separate but are embedded within one another through sensory and motor experience. The Body-mind model of Czamanski Cohen and Weihs [1] suggests that thinking and feeling are situated within sensorimotor experience during artistic production. Similarly, Weinfeld Yehoudayan et al. [5] state that tactile engagement with material can transform somatosensory content that is difficult to verbalise into a form that can be emotionally processed. In this sense, felt as a material that is pressed, kneaded, wetted, rubbed and intensified through puncturing becomes a field where embodied knowledge takes form. The material is not passive. The material itself is not merely a carrier that allows the person to express but an active participant in the processes of thinking and feeling. As Malafouris and Röhricht [3] point out, the material environment and material can be understood as constitutive components of mental processes.
In wet felting, fibres come closer together under water, soap, pressure and friction, the surface softens, spreads, mixes and boundaries become permeable. Needle felting, on the other hand, seemed to reveal itself through repetition, piercing, concentration, fixing and decision making processes. One is closer to flow and the other to stabilisation. One gathers what is dispersed and the other holds what has emerged. For this reason, these two techniques became two different movements of memory for me. Because memory often works in this way, some things spread, fade and mix into one another, while others suddenly knot, intensify and remain insistently present, even repeating to the point of rumination. In this way, memory in this work appeared as a fibrous formation that sometimes thins, sometimes condenses and sometimes knots. For this reason, felt offered a structure through which the workings of memory could be materially thought.
The tree image that emerged gained importance at this point for me. I did not have an intention to produce a direct image of a tree. For me, the tree appeared as a form close to the structure of memory itself. With roots that remain unseen but carry, a trunk that silently accumulates time, branches that extend in multiple directions and surfaces marked by knots and traces, the tree evoked the layered nature of personal and collective memory. In this sense, the tree that emerged from felt suggested how the past is held within the body and material. What the tree evoked in me was the complex states between rooting and movement, continuity and rupture, holding and transformation. Perhaps for this reason, the tree became a threshold image that makes visible how time, body and memory become entangled.
In this process, the body also seemed to negotiate with the material. Felt was not a neutral surface that directly accepted my intention. The way fibres held together, their density, dispersion and resistance shaped the work as much as I did. Some areas did not open as I intended, some transitions became difficult, some colours merged while others resisted. In wet felting, the movement of the hands does not only give form but also changes the rhythm of the body. The weight of water, the slipperiness of soap and the tightening of fibres require persistence rather than speed. In needle felting, movement becomes more refined, the hand moves into a more attentive, more precise and more listening rhythm. The repeated small movements in the wrist open another language of concentration. For this reason, the process was not about applying a pre-existing image but about learning to think with the resistance of the material.
Another important issue for me was the natural quality of the material. Wool carries a warmth, fragility and honesty that separates it from the synthetic. My avoidance of synthetic dyes and artificial brightness did not stem from a romantic idea of naturalness. Rather, it was a desire to maintain the connection between the ecological trace of the material and its sensory qualities. The warmth of wool, the fragility of fibre and the quietness of natural colours shaped the surface also in an ethical sense. The colours of soil, moss, dried grass, rust, shadow and light emerged through this relationship.
At this point, nature no longer remained as something external, observed or represented. Working between wool, water, hand, time and natural colours, nature became less a theme and more a relational field. I was no longer a subject looking at nature, but a body repositioned within fibres, water, colour and time. For this reason, the resulting surface can be thought of as a trace of a threshold where the distinction between human and nature becomes less rigid.
The relationship between textiles and memory also became more visible for me. Hunt [2] considers fabric as an archive and carrier of memory. Sonnleitner [4] suggests that certain objects become biographical objects within specific historical and emotional contexts and gain the capacity to act and relate within life. In my practice, felt opened a similar space where personal and collective memory could hold together within fibres. At the same time, this work did not give memory back to me in its entirety, nor did I expect it to, and I believe that to be impossible. Instead, it offered a way of approaching memory and the past through embodied and artistic openings, a way that does not fix but holds, does not resolve but carries.
For this reason, this work is for me a record of the body allowing itself into the material and the material in turn reshaping the body. The process of pausing, returning and beginning again over two years is also one of the conceptual parts of the work.
What follows is a brief poetic trace of this process, where wool, memory, and bodily feeling continue to unfold in language.
Fig. 1: "Remembering through fet"
1
Morning coolness.
From the wet wool,
the smell of earth,
a wing of wind
and then
a tree,
nameless,
growing in my hands.
2
As water moves through the island of memory,
the fine sound of streams in my fingers.
Moss, shadow,
rain begun yesterday
the world softens
and remembers
my tomorrow to me.
References
- Czamanski-Cohen, J., & Weihs, K. L. (2016). The bodymind model: A platform for studying the mechanisms of change induced by art therapy. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 51, 63–71.
- Hunt, C. (2014). Worn clothes and textiles as archives of memory. Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, 5(2), 207–232.
- Malafouris, L., & Röhricht, F. (2024). Re-thinging embodied and enactive psychiatry: A material engagement approach. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 48(4), 816–839.
- Sonnleitner, J. (2024). Memory and materiality: The becoming of biographic objects after war and forced displacement. Journal of Material Culture, 29(3), 361–376.
- Weinfeld-Yehoudayan, A., Czamanski-Cohen, J., Cohen, M., & Weihs, K. L. (2024). A theoretical model of emotional processing in visual artmaking and art therapy. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 90, Article 102196.
Suggested citation note
Kurt, M. (2026). Remembering through felt. Ecopoiesis: Eco-Human Theory and Practice, 7 (2). [open access internet journal]. – URL: http://ecopoiesis.ru (d/m/y)