hand-felted sheep wool forms the library of vibrant nudibranchs

Library of nudibranchs made from hand-felted sheep wool

Artist Arina Bo creates a hand-felted library of vibrant nudibranchs depicting marine life made from sheep wool. Each nudibranch in this archive is three inches long, grown-up size, as the artist puts it, and each one is a faithful replica of a real species. The cerata, those finger-like projections on a nudibranch’s back that serve as gills and defensive organs, are recreated individually in wool, each in the right shape and color for its species.

The rhinophores, or the sensory horns on the head, are there too, tiny and upright. The surface textures, the spotted patterns, the contrasting color outlines along the body’s edge: all of it is built from colored wool, layer by layer, needle push by needle push, all by hand. Some of the species included across the collections are Verconia romeri, Goniobranchus coi, Cadlinella ornatissima, Tenellia sibogae, Felimida luteorosea, and Hypselodoris imperialis: names that belong to real animals documented by marine biologists, now translated into soft sculptures.

all images courtesy of Arina Bo

Artist Arina Bo recreates shell-less marine mollusks

Nudibranchs are a type of marine gastropod mollusk that lost their shells through evolution. In exchange, they developed some of the most intense colors in the natural world, serving as warnings to predators. Scientists call this aposematism, or defensive color signaling. There are over 3,000 known species, found in oceans, and each one looks different. Some have feathery gill plumes on their backs. Others have raised bumps and ridges. All of these natural forms come up so vividly in artist Arina Bo’s hand-felted sheep wool of nudibranchs.

Across her collection, bright bodies with ringed spots and scattered dots appear alongside creatures with fronds fanning out like a leaf or lattice patterns around their surfaces. The material used to recreate them here is 100 percent sheep wool, as the artist says, worked entirely by hand using a technique called needle felting. Since every collection is handmade, it takes a few days before the artist has them ready (yes, they can be ordered). In an artistic way, the nudibranchs lives on; this time as soft sculptures made from hand-felted sheep wool.

Glaucus atlanticus (Forster, 1777)