Jasmin Viducic
Artist Bio
Jasmin Viducic is a Bay Area based artist working with fiber art and textiles. Growing up Croatian, Jasmin goes back to the historical roots of her heritage and wants to connect more with her family and the way they used wool in every day life. Jasmin uses local sheep’s wool, synthetic and natural dyes to create hand spun yarn threads. Utilizing wool as a way to capture feeling of comfort and healing both physically and emotionally. She creates the yarn as timelines of emotional fluctuation she experiences and processing trauma from her life. The act of creating the yarn is performative and done as a daily art practice in Jasmin’s life. She sits every day at her spinning wheel, creating yarn that comes from her own hand dyed wool fibers from dye material she sources on daily walks or simply from synthetic dyes. The work she creates sparks thoughts of beauty, comfort, and wonder of the age old practices of making yarn from wool fiber.
Artist Statement
Wool has a warmth to it, one that not only warms the skin but warms the soul. I use wool fibers—hand dyed with both synthetic and natural dyes— to record fluctuations in my emotions while sitting at the spinning wheel and turning those fibers into yarn threads. Firstly, I start by dyeing processed wool from local Bay Area sheep farmers with either dye material collected from the land around me, plants grown in my dye garden, or through synthetic dyes. Stewing on the stove for hours, once dyed the wool fibers are ready to be dried and carded so that the wool fibers are spread out and easy to pull apart. Once carded, the wool is then ready to be spun on a spinning wheel by slowly pulling strands of wool and twisting them until they become yarn. The process of spinning is a slow one because tension in the wool can transform how it shapes in the end. Pulling strands of wool too far apart with tight tension will lead to a thin and tight yarn, whereas pulling clumps of wool fibers together with a lesser tension will create pillow-y thick textured wool.
My process of creating yarn is one of comfort and healing. The act of spinning the wool at the wheel is one of intense calm, even when my mind swirls around and can’t seem to stay focused. After living a day with anxiety, the calm I experience at the spinning wheel refreshes me and gives me comfort through the warmth of the wool. Wool is able to absorb and trap body heat, and the warmth that flows through my hands while I am spinning gives me joy. Spinning wool is performative, just me and my spinning wheel in the middle of a room, telling it my thoughts and it listening to me as it records it through the way I spin. To me, there isn’t a point where the wool material ends and my handiwork begins, we work collaboratively to bring about beautiful unique yarn. After creating these strands of yarn, I create large scale installations that feature the yarn in its entirety, showcasing the care and time that goes into make each strand. The yarn invites the viewer to come and examine the beautiful intricacy of each strand— bobbles, twists, turns, thick, and thin— no two strands of yarn are the same and showcase either feelings of calmness or intense anxieties. Wool allows my voice to be heard, and speaks my voice in the way that I create yarn from it.