06/16/2026
Sometimes a piece of art stops you in your tracks and makes you think "How did they make that?"
That's how we felt with Aganetha Dyck's wool vest sculpture. Luckily for us, Dyck shared insights into the process for her series titled "Sizes 8-46," which the sculpture is a part of.
“I chose each item of clothing from thrift store discards or from their regular clothing racks. Other times clothes came to me from friends. My tool to shrink these garments was an old fashioned wringer washing machine filled with scalding hot water plus 1/8 cup of Ivory laundry soap (Ivory preferred due to the scent wafting in my studio), followed by a machine filled with cold water plus one cup of white vinegar. This machine chugged all day, every day, while I read art history books to educate myself.”
The "Sizes 8–46" series is one of Dyck's earliest bodies of work. Created between roughly 1975 and 1981, the works consist of wool garments—sweaters, hats, suits, and other items of clothing—that were deliberately shrunk and felted through repeated washing and drying. What began as an accidental discovery became a sustained artistic investigation into transformation, domestic labor, memory, and the human body.
You can see this sculpture on display now in "Together Apart | Under One Roof" at JNAAG.
