PJ Bergin is an American felt and fiber artist and graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York City with majors in both apparel design and textiles. An avid felt maker, sewer, and knitter, she designs and produces site-specific Network Tapestry™ and other 3-dimensional contemporary and abstract fiber art objects.

PJ Bergin's formal introduction to felting dates to 1998 and a workshop led by the renowned felt maker, Chad Alice Hagen at the Split Rock Campus in Duluth, MN. There she learned the basics and theories behind making felt and how to build 3-dimensional pieces using resists. Inlays, creating surface designs on solid colors, were also explored. In 2005, PJ began selling small scale felted works of her own design.

In 2007, PJ traveled to Pittsburgh and the Society for Contemporary Craft, where with Lisa Klakulak she learned about the properties of wool and how to manipulate it to achieve different results from felting. During the workshop, PJ created freeform three-dimensional elements onto a base felt using resist techniques. Following that experience, Lisa Klakulak came to PJ's Felt In Hand studio and worked privately with her, providing advanced techniques in shaping felt and making inlays from pre-felted pieces.

"My primary body of work today is making felt from wool roving, hand-dyeing it and using this felt for commissioned wall art and sculpture. Felt making is both tactile and visual. With it I design and create original abstract wall art. For my Network Tapestry™, each piece is carefully embellished, making it truly one of a kind. The 'drape' of the tapestry when hung on a wall, lends maximum advantage to light and shadow, playing off my surface design.

Fabric, fiber, and thread have always been a constant in my career. In the beginning, I focused on advanced sewing techniques and apparel design - I made all of my own clothes, even in junior high school. At FIT, I learned about fabric and couturier pattern design, dyeing, and many other techniques. And in the last few years I have come full circle, back to my roots."

PJ Bergin

Color, texture, fiber and thread are the core of my art. These most basic elements first weave a visual and textural image in my mind. Then the fun begins! How to turn that dream into something that you can touch? Something that is both lively and timeless to look at?

Felt-making is my latest challenge. It's back to the primal elements, starting with combed wool roving, adding the alchemy of hand-dyeing, then the tactile process of creating felt from warm soapy fibers. Finally, I layer and manipulate the colored felt into three dimensional sculptural pieces, adding more fiber, wire couching and all manner of surface design.

The challenge of my current work is: how can I take a centuries-old art form and turn it into something beyond its traditional uses for garments and shelter? How can I control a natural fiber and make it do what I want it to, creating something purely aesthetic and visually pleasing?

There also is the structure and scale required for large, site-specific installations. Selecting colors that may at first seem like unlikely partners, I work to pull together a palette that stimulates the eye and challenges the mind.

I seek to "clothe" interior spaces with texture and color in such a way that daylight plays upon the whole, moving with the air currents created by passersby.