Beneath Karoo Skies is a site-specific exhibition co-curated with fashion house VIVIERS for the Karoo Winter Wool Festival 2025. Hosted within an active sheep shearing shed at Dwarsvlei farm near Middelburg, the project unfolded as both fieldwork and collaboration – rooted in landscape, labour, and material memory.
Stepping away from the rhythms of city life, we immersed ourselves in a landscape shaped by time, climate and care. The raw architecture of the shed, from it’s timber beams, sheet metal cladding and chicken mesh, guided the spatial concept. We organised the interior into four sensory ‘rooms’, each expressing a Karoo season through material progression: raw fleece, spun yarn, sculpted felt, and tufted wool. Visitors moved slowly, encountering texture, temperature, scent and sound as living forms of narrative.
Working with what already existed became central. Furniture, tools and farm remnants were sourced directly from Dwarsvlei – not as props, but as co-authors. Materials were gathered through an open invitation to the wool community. Offcuts, surplus yarn, fleece and archival fragments arrived from over 50 contributors. VIVIERS’ Experiential Learning Programme brought students into the process as custodians of material, transforming remnants into works of fashion, craft and art.
Wool World became an act of collective authorship – a celebration of interdependence between land and fibre, farmer and designer, archive and experiment. It asked: what does it mean to design with, rather than for? To slow down enough to listen to landscape, to treat material as memory rather than resource? The exhibition was not just seen, it was felt, inhabited, and held.
For Hoven, Wool World reaffirmed that exhibitions can function as living laboratories – not just displays, but reflections of cultural urgency. Wool is not just an aesthetic choice, but a carrier of time, geography and care. In working with it directly, from it’s origin, design became an act of attention – grounded, reciprocal, and deeply embedded in the landscape.
Called ‘Beneath Karoo Skies’, Wool World 2025 celebrated the richness, diversity and versatility of South African wool, as well as the community responsible for shaping this fibre from farm to form. With more than 50 farmers, designers, artists, makers, studios and industry players contributing, it was a living tapestry of South Africa’s creativity.”
Visi Magazine, September 2025
Exhibition: Karoo Winter Wool Festival 2025, Dwarsvlei Farm
Format: Sensory field exhibition inside an active sheep shearing shed
Materials: Raw fleece, spun wool, felt, tufted textiles, reclaimed farm infrastructure
