Snowshoe Hares

Snowshoe Hare Series
Unspun Wool and VIntage Snowshoe

Juliana Boyd

ALL WORK SOLD

About this Art
For nearly 15 years, Massachusetts resident Juliana Boyd has been exploring the limits of painting with wool. After a decade of creating hundreds of textural paintings of animals, flowers, mushrooms, and more, she has clearly mastered her medium. Boyd uses a technique known as needle felting in which she employs a barbed needle to apply and compress unspun wool onto a background fabric. She layers varying amounts of different colors of wool similar to how a painter layers washes of color. The end result is a rich, dimensional realism achieved through the blending of colors and the sculptural quality of the raised wool.

For this body of work, Boyd created a series of snowshoe hares that present themselves from the surfaces of vintage snowshoes. The hares—encircled by the bent ash frame of the traditional snowshoes—leap, sit, and stretch across the rawhide webbing. Some are in their winter coats of white, whereas others are wearing the dusky shades of warmer seasons, but all seem perfectly at home on their snowshoes. Boyd’s hares, like her other animals, make you want to reach out and touch them. You know they aren’t real, but they have a compelling life of their own, as well as a sense of a larger story.