By Emily Winter

Every summer from 2012-2019, a group of commercial wool-buyers converged on the Navajo Nation to purchase raw wool from Diné producers. The wool was shipped to Ohio for sorting then onto South Carolina for scouring. In the process, the wool transformed from a material with a visible origin & history into a generic commodity dispersed into the global market. Wool Work makes visible some of the places, people and processes that constitute this segment of the wool supply chain--it's an exercise in close looking, in finding value in the mundane and in seeking traces of history, labor and landscape in the textiles we make and live with.

This research was supported by a Craft Research Fund grant from the Center for Craft