Prince to come face to face with ‘woolly doppelgänger’ on tour
‘I feel like I’ve gotten to know him,’ Manitoba artist says of Royal
The Prince of Wales is set to be greeted by a sheepish figure when he arrives in Canada on Tuesday: his own “woolly doppelgänger.”
Prince Charles will lock eyes with a life-size, hand-needle-felted bust of his own visage as he meets with Canadian wool enthusiasts in St. John’s, N.L., at one of the first stops on his three-day cross-country tour alongside wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall.
But that’s not even the “piece de resistance” of the prince’s woolly welcome, said Matthew Rowe, CEO of the Campaign for Wool in Canada. The non-profit industry association will also present its royal patron with a wool sculpture of his mother, the Queen.
“He’s going to come face to face with his woolly doppelgänger,” Rowe said. “What we’ll be unveiling for the first time at that event will be a second bust, this time of Her Majesty, in honour of the Platinum Jubilee. So he’ll meet his woolly mother as well.”
Franco-Manitoban fibre artist Rosemarie Péloquin said she had many conversations with the royal busts over the hundreds of hours she spent making each of them, poking and pulling wool with a barbed needle to felt the fine details of their faces.
Now, Péloquin is preparing to speak to the real-life prince Tuesday.
“You spend so much time in the studio with him that I feel like I’ve gotten to know him, really, in the making,” Péloquin said by phone from St-Pierre-Jolys, Man. “I can’t wait to meet him and to see him looking at himself.”
The sculpture of the prince stands 56 centimeters tall, and aside from a wooden base, is made completely of homegrown wool — from the wrinkles on his forehead, to his red, white and blue tie.
Péloquin said she conducts extensive research on her subjects so she can render not only their appearance, but their “essence.” She homed in on what she saw as some of the prince’s defining features, including his “kind eyes”.
“He’s very interested in people, and that’s why I made him leaning forward and listening,” she said. “I hope that that brings us together in a conversation about wool and about art, and about people and the world.”