Shear skill

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This article was published 17/05/2022 (1323 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sitting in silence at her worktable, the only sound the scratchy push and pull of wool, Rosemarie Péloquin’s hands moved carefully as she crafted the life-size bust of HRH Prince Charles made entirely out of natural fibre.

She enjoys the zen approach, she says. “I like silence. I like hearing the crunch of the wool. I like to be quiet because the wool is speaking to me and then so is the person.”

Today the Manitoba artist will present her work to the prince himself when he meets wool enthusiasts as part of the Campaign for Wool Canada — a non-profit industry association — in St. John’s, N.L., at one of the first stops on his three-day cross-country tour alongside his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall.

“It’s going to be really interesting for him to see himself,” she says. “I am very honoured and excited to meet him. I think it’s genius to have the patron of the campaign have a bust of himself made from all Canadian wool.”

Péloquin, who is from St-Pierre-Jolys, worked for months on the bust and says she feels like she got to know the prince by looking at countless pictures and listening to videos. She digs deep when researching in order to present more than just a model. Her aim is to capture the essence of the person and for this piece she says she wanted to show the prince’s interest in people, and his kindness.

“Sometimes I had to set him aside when I started to lose the features, only coming back to work after ruminating. Once I felt I had absorbed enough I worked instinctively.”

The bust, which she playfully dubs the Prairie Province Prince, is made completely out of homegrown fibres. And Péloquin can pinpoint the provenance of each piece of wool, sometimes right down to the sheep it came from.

“The eyes, the teeth, everything is made from needle-felted wool. The wool on the head his hair came from Merlin, a Wensleydale ram from Manitoba,” she says.

The prince won’t just be meeting himself. Péloquin will be unveiling — for the first time — a bust of the Queen she has been working on for the past year.

“She came on the plane with me and she will be revealed tomorrow. I don’t think even Prince Charles knows.

“She was a lot of fun to do, even though it’s hard to do bling with wool. She has pearls and she’s wearing a maple leaf brooch, all of which are needle felted, and that took a lot of time.”

The piece shows her smiling with a “twinkle in her eye,” and the long curly wool that Péloquin used gave her iconic coif slightly more volume.

“I feel that that’s not only the essence of the sheep coming through, but also of her,” she said. “There’s that kind of fun aspect of her that’s there, and we might not see it and she might not show it in public all the time, but it’s there.”

The artist is pleased with how both pieces have turned out, saying that even though the busts weren’t made to be sitting together, they look good side by side.

“We were going to have tea before I left and I invited my sisters and brothers and in-laws, but we ran out of time so we had happy hour instead, because it’s the Jubilee year.

“(The Queen’s) been working for 70 years; I think she deserves to have fun!”

Founded in 2010, the Campaign for Wool was launched in Canada in 2014 during Prince Charles and Camilla’s visit to Pictou, N.S.

CEO Matthew Rowe said the prince’s support came at a nadir for the national wool industry as the forces of fast fashion depleted demand for the age-old textile.

In 1941, Canada sold more than 10 million pounds of wool, Statistics Canada data suggest. By 2006, sales had plummeted to roughly 2.8 million pounds.

Rowe said the campaign commissioned Péloquin’s busts in recognition of all the prince has done to bolster a fibre that has been “interwoven in the history of Canada” since French settlers brought the first sheep to the country in the mid-17th century.

“(The campaign) sort of — pardon the pun — knit together the global wool industry,” said Rowe. “It’s a great opportunity to kind of check in to show what we’ve been able to accomplish for Canadian wool.”

— with files from The Associated Press