Kansas-based artist Jennifer Schermerhorn creates figurative sculptures that sit at the intersection of the female body, identity, and society’s long history of defining what a woman should be. Her work draws a pointed parallel between the domestication of animals and the social conditioning of women, using that tension to open up a larger conversation about what it means to inhabit a female body in contemporary culture.
What makes Schermerhorn’s practice so visually and conceptually rich is her chosen medium: needle-felted wool. Working with natural fibers over wire armatures, she builds her figures by repeatedly piercing raw wool with sharp, barbed felting needles, a process that gradually tangles and compresses individual fibers into something firm and strong. Various fabrics, fibers, and found objects are incorporated as embellishment throughout her pieces.
The wool itself carries meaning. Soft, warm, and associated with comfort and care, it mirrors the qualities historically assigned to women. But beneath that inviting surface lies what Schermerhorn describes as a mayhem and cacophony of individual fibers being forced to come together into a seamless veneer. She finds in that process a deeply fitting metaphor for the female experience.
Animals appear throughout her sculptures, not as decorative elements, but as mirrors. The same cultural systems that have sought to tame and domesticate nature have long been applied to women, and her work refuses to let that go unexamined.
Schermerhorn came to felting through a Kansas Alliance of Weavers and Spinners conference, where she learned the foundational technique before quickly making it entirely her own. She lives and works in an old farmhouse on the Kansas prairie, alongside her family and a small flock of sheep.
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