Recent installations like “Forest of Rest” reveal how her vision continues to evolve. Here, crystalline elements and mirrors complement textile work in fully immersive environments. Jellyfish-like forms drift overhead as organic growths in greens, grays, and blues carpet the ground below. Visitors remove their shoes to physically connect with these dreamlike landscapes where rest becomes both action and place.

While much of contemporary design focuses on creating beautiful spaces to be admired, Alfie’s work offers something more fundamental: environments that embrace you like an old friend, where healing isn’t just possible but inevitable, and every texture and form seems to radiate empathy. Her practice, born from a personal need to create softness in an increasingly hard-edged world, has evolved into a broader vision of how spaces can hold and heal us. In these carefully crafted worlds, comfort becomes something you can touch, something that touches you back.

Read on for our conversation with Alfie about finding home in unexpected places, the evolution of her practice, and what it means to create spaces of genuine comfort and healing.

You’ve spoken about your family’s experience of displacement and finding home through connection to natural surroundings. How has this influenced your understanding of what “home” means, and how does that manifest in your creative practice?

I think coming from a more nomadic approach to home, made it easier to see our world as a home. Where sometimes basic roots were missing, a sense of being a little part of a bigger system emerged. An understanding of the responsibility to the whole, and finding ‘home’ and ‘family’ on many different levels. Being a family with a place or an ecosystem, and being a family with your body, thoughts, feelings and self. At the same time also, being a planet for all the billions of living things inside you.

The holistic idea of home is a big part of my practice, the pieces I make serve as a reminder of our different constellations and relations, to other humans, to nature, and to angels. Bringing nature into the home, but also showing the different scales of life gives the pieces a familiar, yet new aesthetic. It can at the same time look like a mossy forest, an underwater world, a cell formation, and a star system. Trying to find a universal language for the joy of life.

Growing up with Anthroposophic education emphasized maintaining childlike wonder. What role does this philosophy play in your work within today’s art world?

Seeing the magic around us, as if we see it for the first time is very important to me, and somewhere where I find my inspiration. Staying excited through every part of the process, I take so much joy in it. From sourcing the materials to the often collaborative design process and every step of the making. The playfulness is visible throughout the work. And I hope the energy woven into the pieces is seen and felt by the viewer.

The shift from fashion to textile art emerged from what you’ve described as ‘an intense longing.’ How has your relationship with that initial impulse evolved as you’ve grown and developed your studio practice?

The intense longing has gone from being a very personal experience, to my motivation and philosophy of the studio.

My mission to make the world a softer place is getting more defined and conscious. My practice started from a need to pull myself out of a dark place, and to create the visual and emotional surrounding I wanted to live in. Since the world has overall become a place with quite some darkness, it feels even more important to show a possible path forward, a soft and kind path to walk with bare feet and feel the warmth through the soles of your feet. You become like your environment.

Your work transforms wool into these sculptural landscapes that seem to grow organically from the ground up. Could you describe how a piece comes together, from the first spark of an idea to the final form?

I start with a quick, intuitive sketch. Finding places or moments of joy, and our guardian angels and selves. More or less abstract, sometimes just becoming colour or shape, sometimes more figurative, with clearer narratives. But always floating in a dreamstate. My mother is a dancer, always doing what makes her happy. I think watching her and her dancers influenced my drawings, which are always in motion.

Stylistically I draw from the natural world with its organic shapes and hints to both flora and fauna, but also seen through our new digital nature of light and colour, and the fluidity of our time. Anthroposophic thinking has also influenced some guidelines of the style. For example, in never using straight lines or sharp angles, to not entrap the mind, and it has influenced a sense of spirituality in the work.

My process is very intuitive, also technically. I use a mix of traditional rug-making techniques with self-developed hand work additions. I work with a pneumatic tufting gun, using compressed air to shoot threads through a stretched cloth. I am very interested in the textural surfaces it makes, and how to push the boundaries of the technique. And after, I sculpt it with scissors and shears and add layers of texture with height differences and various hand embroideries. It is like slowly growing a garden.

I also very much enjoy commissioned works. There is something so tingling in the collaborative process. I love when people tell me their stories to be woven into the works. Daring to be part of your own environment is beautiful.

You seem to find endless possibilities in your material – even creating new work from the remnants of previous pieces. Could you share how you continue learning to work with wool in more and more depth?

I just love it as a material. It has so many properties and possibilities. Beyond its innate warmth and comforting softness, it possesses sculptural qualities that resonate with my artistic vision. A natural and enduring fiber, aligns with sustainability as it is swiftly renewable, biodegradable, and recyclable. Its virtues extend to stain resistance, flame retardancy, hypoallergenic attributes, and ease of care. With inherent UV protection and antibacterial properties. Yet, my personal favourite lies in its ability to reflect body heat, creating an embrace-like sensation when lying upon or leaning against the creations.

It seems to have almost endless possibilities, I keep developing new techniques. At the moment I am busy with a new knotting technique for long strands of flowing wool, giving it the chance to regain its natural curls.