31 Walnuts reflects Abigail Hedley’s sustained engagement with the slow, accumulative logic of building volume through wool felting—a process that is at once tactile, iterative, and quietly transformative. In her hands, wool becomes an unlikely sculptural agent, capable of conjuring density and mass while never fully relinquishing its inherent softness. This tension is central to Hedley’s practice.
Her work constructs uncanny relationships from seemingly incompatible conditions: hard and soft, abstract and concrete, real and imagined. These oppositions are not simply juxtaposed, but metabolized through process—compressed, layered, and coaxed into forms that feel both familiar and estranged. The resulting objects carry a peculiar authority, as if they belong equally to the physical world and to some interior, speculative terrain.
The sculptures that emerge from these investigations—as exemplified in 31 Walnuts—occupy a liminal space, a kind of perceptual fold where objective reality gives way to representation, and representation slips toward invention. They hover in that charged interval between recognition and projection, inviting viewers to reconcile what they see with what they sense: weight with pliancy, structure with yielding, the known with the imagined.
Abigail Hedley (they/them) is a Midwest artist, instructor, and fabricator. As a wool sculptor utilizing needle felting as their preferred craft, Abigail creates works that embed stories, narratives, and emotions into the fibers of each piece. Bouncing between figural and object representations, they seek to capture palpable human experiences into these fragmented stills. Abigail has a BFA from the University of Iowa and MFA from University of Tennessee-Knoxville. They currently work as a public art consultant, in which they have an extensive background.
