About

Wool World began as an exhibition — a gathering of artists, designers and makers at Dwarsvlei Farm in the Karoo, brought together by a shared belief in South African wool as a creative material.

Wool World began as a problem worth having.

Every winter our exhibition fills a Karoo shearing shed with the work of fifty-odd artists, makers and fashion designers. There are intricate tapestries, felted sculptures, wool-covered furniture and garments knitted from precious merino wool or mohair.

Every year we get so busy building the show that often times the work would come down off the walls with nowhere to go. 

By opening this site, we are able to keep the shed open all year, and makers are supported enough to plan and create works sustainably for next year's show.

For those visiting us, it's a place to find a piece, learn who made it, and carry a little part of the Karoo home with you. Nothing here is mass-made. Most of it exists exactly once.

 

 

The exhibition is co-curated by Viviers Studio, one of South Africa's most distinctive fashion and textile practices, and Hoven, a Johannesburg-based interior architecture firm. Together they shape an exhibition that moves between fashion, art, design and the spaces we inhabit.

 

 

Wool World is an act of collective authorship. By coming together, the group of makers and designers celebrate the interdependence between land and fibre, farmer and designer, archive and experiment.

Visitors of Wool World are reminded to slow down enough to listen to landscape, to treat material as memory rather than resource.