In the mid-1980s, a match was made in heaven when Martien Van Zuilen, a wool artist from the Netherlands, came to Australia during an explosion in the sheep flock and wool production.
Following several years of travelling, teaching, making and researching, she found a home base in Perth, which allowed her to put down roots within the fibre art industry and hone her passion for felt-making.
It's a practice that has taken her right to the source of wool fibres, Carnamah, in the North Midlands region of the Mid West.
Ms Van Zuilen is in her second residency in the area, one of five artists invited to spend time in the region and deliver community workshops and art programs.
Her first residency was at Carnamah, in 2021, organised by the North Midlands Project in collaboration with the Carnamah Historical Society.
Ms Van Zuilen worked closely with the society on a research project and with the broader community which inspired her final body of work.
The research focused on the history of sheep farming in the region.
She discovered the North Midlands had a long history of sheep farming, dating back to the mid-1800s, which wasn't widely known.
"What was fascinating to me was the depth of the historical records," Ms Van Zuilen said.
"It's often a region thought of for cropping, people think there's no sheep in that region."
Her current residency, again organised by the North Midlands Project, explores the theme of 'time and place'.
"It centres on how people manage change differently as they move through life's ages and stages," Ms Van Zuilen said.
"It's about the wisdom of hindsight or your dreams for the future."
Ms Van Zuilen is interested in how material objects and keepsakes can hold memories and be signposts of times gone by.
"It's not material objects as in financial value, but the things that are really special to us and conversations about 'what would you save out of a burning building?'.''
Her own sentimental object is a box containing 16 years of correspondence with her mother during the 1980s.
In 1985, when she was 23, Ms Van Zuilen moved from her home in The Netherlands to Australia and regularly wrote to her mother back home.
"There was still the old blue airmail paper and the aerograms," she said.
After Ms Van Zuilen's mother died in 2001, she was reunited with a box of her own letters, adjacent to the letters she had been collecting - a perfect set of back and forth conversations.
"That's pretty special, that's very meaningful to me," she said.
Ms Van Zuilen's own younger voice penned in the letters left her thinking about how far she had come, she said.
"I was thinking 'where has that led to, those decisions I made in the 90s?'," she said.
"In a way they're contributed to what I do now and the arts and how I work and the places I went to.
"That's a very different time and a different place, but informs what I do now."
Ms Van Zuilen has recently been crafting vessels, which are circular in many ways.
"If you look at the word 'vessel', a synonym for the word is also 'receptacle' or something that can carry something else,'' she said.
"So symbolically it can carry a story or hold something.
"And a holding is also a farm."
Felt is a dense fabric made from sheep's fleece fibres, which doesn't require spinning or weaving.
"You can just take fibres from the back of a sheep and begin," she said.
The process of felting uses water and soap to agitate the fibres, which causes them to become matted and interlock.
"That's the nature of wool fibres, it's not unlike if you were to put a woolly jumper in a washing machine on a hot cycle accidentally, the jumper would shrink a lot," Ms Van Zuilen said.
"But that's essentially what we do on purpose with the wool fibres."
The process is thousands of years old and can be dated back to the Neolithic period across central Asia.
Ms Van Zuilen said because the craft didn't require anything other than water, soap and "elbow grease", feltmaking was a low-barrier art form which anyone, of any age, could do.
While living in the Netherlands, Ms Van Zuilen completed a degree in social work.
For years she worked in mental health and crisis intervention, as well as residential care.
During this time, feltmaking was just a hobby.
During a four-month research trip, Ms Van Zuilen visited feltmakers in Mongolia, witnessing the craft in its place of origin.
"That led me on a path of thinking it was time to learn more,'' she said.
In the early 2000s, Ms Van Zuilen studied an undergraduate degree in anthropology at The University of Western Australia.
In 2013 she furthered her anthropology knowledge by completing a PhD in the field.
Part of her practice in this North Midlands residency is to use as much locally sourced material as possible.
She wanted to establish a connection with the land and the community.
At the start of her first residency, she was gifted two fleeces, which she is still using.
"Within two days I was visiting farms where shearing was going on and connecting with the farming community,'' she said.
"I was gifted a beautiful 16 micron Merino fleece.
"I know the people, and I know where it comes from, so when I work with it I know where that fibre comes from."
The fleece was from Simon and Amy Brandenburg, who farm east of Carnamah.
She uses natural spring water and fallen vegetation to dye the wool fibres in the colours of the region.
This method and intention was highly respected by the community.
"You harvest all your wool and then it goes on the back of a truck and farmers never see it again,'' Ms Van Zuilen said.
"What I heard back was that it was meaningful for people to see what happened with their produce.
"We had a lot of people come to the art exhibition who said to me, 'I wouldn't normally come to an art gallery because it's not quite my thing, but you're using what we created' and that was heartwarming".
When not in a residency, Ms Van Zuilen works from Perth, where she has lived since 1998.
She said she didn't have much knowledge or experience with the North Midlands, until she was offered her first residency in 2021.
The residencies are a chance for artists to expand their skill sets and immerse themselves in local culture.
"You come with a skill set, you come with ideas about what you might want to do, but for me it's also about bringing a sense of curiosity and learning about a region - not just by reading about it or doing the research, but by seeing it through someone else's eyes,'' she said.
"Over time, the North Midlands region and the North Midlands Project, as an organisation, has become a home away from home for me, I've felt very welcomed."
Experiencing the region through the seasons has inspired her work, Ms Van Zuilen said.
"It's a vast region - certainly if I can compare it to the country where I was born - and so sparsely populated by comparison, but there's productive land and some bushland, and the salt lake system, for me, is just totally awe inspiring,'' she said.
"It can look the same, but it's not.
"Even driving from Perenjori to Carnamah, which is only 60 kilometres, you can see the landscape change.
"I think it affects the way I see colours, it's so different to being in the city."
The residency has shown Ms Van Zuilen the importance of art in regional and rural communities.
She said the work of the North Midlands Project was a "front-runner" in actively creating healthy communities and connected towns.
Ms Van Zuilen said cultural and mental health initiatives had tremendous power to strengthen communities.
"If people are engaged creatively, that has an impact on wellbeing, or how people might view their town livability and things like social cohesion as well," she said.
