I always drove past the cotton fields. They always caught my eye—so real, yet somehow surreal. Under this soft layer of cotton, spread across the land, quietly facing the sky. Sometimes they looked like clouds resting on the ground, sometimes like cotton candy—soft, weightless, a little unreal.
One day, I took a few and brought them home. For a while, they simply stayed there, soft and light, almost like air. Sometimes I would hold them, gently pull them apart. The seeds inside surprised me—more than I’d expected. Over time, I start to work with them—not to shape them into something else, but to stay alongside their stillness. I brought in fabric stabilizer as part of this process. Together, we found a way for the cotton to rest as it wished—held, yet light. Suspended, yet quietly alive.
Perhaps every pause holds its own kind of waiting. A soft moment, staying for a while.
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Idle, explores the nuances of stillness—being, resting, waiting—through handpicked cotton and fabric stabilizer. The work captures a state of suspension, where presence and absence intertwine. Cotton, a material rich with history and labor, becomes a vessel for quiet reflection, inviting viewers to consider what lingers in stillness. By suspending the fibers in a delicate balance, the piece embodies an in-between state, where time slows and traces of the past remain palpable.
I hand-picked the cotton from the field and used a specialized wet felting technique to stabilize and bind the fibers together.
