Gladys Paulus (b. 1973) is a Dutch-Indonesian artist working predominantly with fibre. A fourth-generation artist and maker, her practice centres on felted sheep’s wool and examines themes of identity, lineage, and belonging. Drawing on her experience as a queer person of mixed heritage and a descendant of refugee migrants, she creates work that reflects on inherited histories and their continued relevance within contemporary contexts.

Paulus is recognised for her use of traditional wet-felting techniques, employing slow, hand-making processes to produce tactile and emotive works that occupy the space between object, ritual, and offering. Felt’s ancient lineage and material properties enable her to explore concepts such as memory, narrative, and transformation, while critically engaging with the boundaries between art and craft.

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Born and raised in the Netherlands, Paulus currently lives and works in Somerset, England. She is a specialist visiting tutor across the UK, Europe, the USA, and Canada. A trained coach, she is widely respected for her ability to combine rigorous technical instruction with a sensitive and intuitive approach to guiding others through their creative processes, and many of her students continue to work with her over extended periods. Paulus is a former exhibiting member of the 62 Group of Textile Artists and is listed on the Crafts Council’s Selected Index of Makers. Her work is held in the collection of the Wereldmuseum (Amsterdam) and in private collections in the USA, Canada, and the UK.

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A CV is available on request.

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ARTIST STATEMENT:

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My practice sits at the intersection of fine art and traditional craft, where making becomes a slow, embodied form of inquiry. I work primarily with felted sheep’s wool, drawn to its primal tactility, ancient lineage, and capacity to hold memory and emotion. Through hand-making and repetitive and ritualised processes, I explore how materials carry ancestral knowledge and stories, and how they can become vessels for transformation, quiet resistance, and restoration.

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My work is rooted in questions of identity, lineage, and belonging. As a Dutch-Indonesian artist, a queer person of mixed heritage, and a descendant of refugee migrants, I am deeply engaged with the inherited histories that shape both personal and collective experience. I see my practice as a dialogue between past and present—an attempt to make visible what has been forgotten, silenced, marginalised, or repressed. Not to romanticise history, but to question it, understand its impact on the present, and learn from it.

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Felt allows me to blur boundaries between art, craft, and ritual—between object and offering. As one of the oldest textile forms, felt is intimately tied to landscape, survival, and the human body. The wet-felting techniques I use have remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years, and working within this continuity connects me to a lineage of makers across time. By stretching and shrinking wool into new dimensions, I create works that are not simply objects, but spaces for reflection, contemplation, and embodied experience.

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Slowness is central to my process. Meditation and embodiment practices inform how I work, guiding me toward attentiveness, care, and listening—to the material, to my own body, and to what wants to emerge. In a world driven by speed, utility, and surface-level engagement, I see my work as a quiet act of defiance: a commitment to mystery, beauty, and the sacred. 

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To felt is to connect - to merge disparate fibres - and I extend this act to bring together the opposing cultural forces that have shaped my life. This is where my work thrives: in the in-between, in belonging and not belonging, in the tension between the sacred and the profane, the personal and the universal. Ultimately, my goal is to create spaces - material and emotional - where viewers can slow down, feel, remember, and reconnect with what lies beneath the surface, carrying these reflections forward into their own lives and into their connections with others.

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Photo reportage & interview by Together&Sunspell October 2017