On 6 May, VSU's History Museum opened an exhibition of woollen pictures “Woollen Fantasy” by Natalia Dankova, an engineer at the Department of Ecology and Systematics of Invertebrates of the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences.
Natalia Dankova is a VSU graduate and has been working at the university since 1995. She has loved art since she was a child, and in 2013 she started creating woollen pictures.
She uses sheep wool processed in a specific way and dyed in various colours. She also combines wool with other materials, such as silk, viscose, camel wool, alpaca wool, and soy and banana fibre yarns. Every picture is like a fine multi-layer woollen pie put between a glass and a fibreboard. The technique is called “wool painting”. It does not require needle felting. The fibres are ironed to make them stick together and then put under glass.
Natalia Dankova tries to imitate paintings by famous artists, as well as photographs and her own paintings. She either draws a sketch on paper, or prints out an image, covers it with a fusible web, and lays out fibres of wool over the lines.
