A giant wool lamb by Netherlands-based designer Christien Meindertsma, made using a pioneering new fabrication technology, has been unveiled as this year’s MECCA x NGV Women in Design Commission, opening today at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Meindertsma’s work ‘First there was a mountain 2024’ repurposes wool from a flock of more than 2000 sheep based in Rotterdam that would have otherwise been discarded as waste.
She worked with Dutch machine developer Tools for Technology to pioneer a 3D-felting tool known as the ‘Wobot’ to produce the commission.
Meindertsma describes herself as a product designer interested in “everything that happens before the product is the product and everything that happens after”. Her curiosity lies in where products come from, who made them, where and why.
“I either research existing parts of products or, in my own design practice, I really like to work with materials that are local or somehow part of our history or heritage,” she tells Australian Design Review.
Wool and linen have long been Meindertsma’s materials of choice, both of which have been around for hundreds of years in the Netherlands.
“I think materials that are part of the land that you are from might have an extra meaning to you, even if you don’t know what the connection is or how it works exactly,” she says.
Three years ago, the city of Rotterdam commissioned Meindertsma to research the quality of a five-tonne “mountain” of dirty wool perceived to be worthless.
“They pay a shepherd in Rotterdam to keep the grass short, but he had to throw away his wool each year. So he said, ‘Can you find a solution for me?’” she explains.
With the budget to test the hypothesis in practice, Meindertsma washed the wool. She also travelled to the UK, where greater wool knowledge and industry still remains.
“By doing this we actually found out this wool is fine. You can make really lovely Donegal tweeds out of it and you can make felt,” she says.
The project concluded that the problem was not with this wool – or other coarse European varieties that are often disposed of in favour of soft Merino – but the traditional production process.
“I thought: this all works, but in the current economic system it’s really complicated to produce products that way because they are really expensive and having to compete with all these cheap products that we are surrounded by,” she says.
“The techniques that I had encountered, a lot of them are 100 years old or 200 years old. At the time they were really high tech, but what would happen if you created a new technique with what we can do now?”
Meindertsma set out to build a machine for 3D-felting wool with the help of Tools for Technology.
Meindertsma received earlier commissions overseas to develop her collaborative ‘Wobot’ (“wool-robot”), but the 2024 MECCA x NGV Women in Design Commission has allowed for its largest and most ambitious iteration to date.
With it, Meindertsma has printed the three-metre-high lamb and a chair. Both are made 95 percent from the Rotterdam wool and five percent from recycled merino wool, which can be uncombed and reused. She stresses that the Rotterdam portion is virgin wool, despite exhibition texts describing it as waste – a common misconception she attributes to our “strange, modern way of treating materials”.
Although Wobot is not physically present at the NGV exhibition, it is the crux of this commission.
“There is a lamb and chair here, but really what we made is the Wobot – we needed these two objects to make the machine,” Meindertsma explains.
Wobot does make an appearance at the exhibition in a film by Roel van Tour. The filmmaker has also captured the birth of a lamb and its clumsy maiden ascent onto its feet – a moment as tense as waiting for the first cry of a newborn human.
“I thought this was a nice moment to try to capture in an object because, getting it on its feet, I knew that would be very complicated for this material,” Meindertsma says.
The lamb presented a “good trial shape” to Meindertsma; printing only the chair would have been a “pity”.
“When you pour something straight into a finished product shape, it doesn’t enable you to think about the other shapes it could have. My goal is really to develop the machine as a production technique for many different applications, not just one,” she says.
She hopes the commission will open up an array of material possibilities for soft and hard structures, from acoustic panels to insulation, packaging, furniture finishes and fillers like foam rubber, or even on an architectural scale.
Simone LeAmon, the Hugh Williamson curator of contemporary design and architecture at the NGV, described the work as “an extraordinary gift to industry” that examines how wool might be a substitute for less sustainable materials.
The 2024 MECCA x NGV Women in Design Commission will be on display from 3 October 2024 – February 2025 at NGV International, St Kilda Road.
Read more about the Women in Design Commission.
Lead image of designer Christien Meindertsma with First there was a mountain 2024 for the MECCA x NGV Women in Design Commission, on display from 3 October 2024–February 2025 at NGV International, Melbourne. Photo: Eugene Hyland