Queering Felt with Mixed Media Interjections by Eli West
June 27, 2025
Colorful, garish, and joyful worlds made primarily from fiber and mixed media are at the center of my work. I utilize a variety of needle and wet felting techniques, which allows me to produce unique textured painterly images with a high degree of precision and detail, often coupled with mixed media elements to create sculpture or wall art. This blending of unlikely materials is key to my visual language. My work broadly speaks to the multilayered complexities presented within contemporary queer culture. Often overlooked by the world of high brow contemporary art, my chosen medium of fiber pushes back against these predisposed ideas of high and low culture, while also building a parallel to how the queer experience is often overlooked within our society.
Eli West, Best Award (ribbon), 2024. Thread, card stock, mylar, plastic, acrylic, glass beads, tracing paper and air dry clay, approximately 1 x 1 foot. Photo by the artist.
My desire to work in felt is born from a space of agitation and pressure, the very elements that are required to transform raw fiber into felt. Held in congruence with my own playful impulsiveness—which are complimented (and sometimes complicated) by mixed media components—these material qualities also become emblematic of my experience as a queer person in a contemporary culture. A culture which requires an equivalent amount of agitation, pressure, transformation and playfulness as a matter of survival. The images included within this article highlight examples of felt and mixed media combinations I consider successful and also point towards the direction my practice is going in.
Eli West, Kate Bush, 2013. Plaster, dryer lint, felted wool, carded roving, wheat paste, glue and acrylic, 16 x 20 inches. Photo by the artist.
Kate Bush was one of the first gallery-ready mixed media and felt combinations I made. The canvas was painted before being built on with a combination of plaster dryer lint and a wheat paste concoction which created a sculptural base and form. Once that form cured I then applied a mixture of roving that had some pre-felted details mixed in. The final piece was sealed with multiple layers of dryer lint.
Eli West, Push The Cart Too Fast, 2019. Felting foam, fiber paste, glue, thread, acrylic, needle-felted roving, wood and glass bead paste, approximately 18 x 12 x 12 inches. Photo: PNCA Photo Department.
Push the cart too fast ruminates on rushing into situations and then watching them fall apart, this piece depicts a mixed media wheelbarrow spilling its cargo out on a pedestal. The wheelbarrow and wheels base form is an old needle felting pad molded into shape with fiber paste and adhesive attached to wooden handles. The stones spilling out of this piece are wet and needle felted.
Eli West, Finger Bone, 2021. Felted roving, pie tin, acrylic paint, tracing paper, cardboard, fiber paste, acrylic and glitter, approximately 32 x 6 inches. Photo by the artist.
Finger Bone is one of my favorites because of its scale, coming in at about 3 feet in length and its jarring yet clear blending of materials. The finger form is wet felted with a paper mâché bone, jutting out of it as well as a mixed media finger nail (a reimagined pie tin).
Eli West, Best Award, 2023. Felted roving with wool prefelt base, approximately 2 x 3 feet. Photo by the artist.
Best Award revolves around a large wet and needle felted self portrait with a series of dimensional mixed media award ribbons. Each cartoonish award shows renderings of beer cans at the center. This is a reflection on the entanglement of joy, desire for community, and uncertainty that came from entering back into queer nightlife punctuated by increased bigotry and hate towards queer bodies.
Eli West, Gods Favorite Stain (detail), 2025. Felted roving, polymer and wood, approximately 36 x 24 inches. Photo by the artist.
Gods Favorite Stain playfully examines the absurdity and hypocrisy inherent in some men’s obsession with their own bodily fluids existence, which somehow emboldens them to restrict half the population’s reproductive rights. This dimensional felted sculpture engages with the frames boundaries, centering the frame as a vital part of the sculpture completed with an unsettling addition of a mixed media eye.
Eli West in front of Best Award, 2023.
–Eli West’s (they/them/he/him) practice is a painterly, gaudy, and sparkling reflection on a queer human experience materially rooted in fibers and cartoonish mixed media to create wall hangings, sculptural pieces, and soft abstractions. Eli’s an interdisciplinary artist with an MFA in Applied Craft + Design from the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
