LJ Roberts
‘Jacqueline Mautner (Free CeCe)’, 2012
Embroidery on cotton
‘rosza daniel lang/levitsky at the New York City Dyke
March’, 2013
Embroidery on cotton
‘Frederick Weston’, 2018
Embroidery on cotton
LJ Roberts
Roberts embroiders their friends and loved ones in these small, intimate portraits that give visibility to the lives and activism of an intergenerational community of queer people. Jacqueline Mautner, depicted at a Drag March in the East Village, New York, sports a mascara moustache and shows her solidarity with CeCe McDonald, a transgender woman and activist who was incarcerated following a transphobic attack. rosza daniel lang/levitsky holds a placard among friends at the New York City Dyke March, while Frederick Weston prepares to raise awareness of the criminalisation of HIV at a Sunday Pride parade.
Roberts links the debasement of needlework as craft with the underrepresentation of queer people and their politics; these works reclaim both the people and the medium as worthy of attention and celebration. The works are displayed to show both the back and the front of the embroideries, which Roberts considers as important as each other. Behind every person or story is a messy underside, and the particular dissolves into a more universal web of connectedness.*
From the exhibition
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
(February – May 2024)
Textiles are vital to our lives. We are swaddled in them when we’re born, we wrap our bodies in them every day, and we’re shrouded in them when we die.
What does it mean to imagine a needle, a loom or a garment as a tool of resistance? How can textiles unpack, question, unspool, unravel and therefore reimagine the world around us?
Since the 1960s, textiles have become increasingly present in artistic practices for subversive ends. This is significant as the medium has been historically undervalued within the hierarchies of Western art history. Textiles have been considered ‘craft’ in opposition to definitions of ‘fine art’, gendered as feminine and marginalised by scholars and the art market. The 50 international artists in this show challenge these classifications, harnessing the medium to speak powerfully about intimate, everyday stories as well as wider socio-political narratives, teasing out these entangled concerns through a stitch, a knot, a braid, through the warp and the weft. These artists defy traditional expectations of textiles, embracing abstraction or figuration to push the boundaries of the medium. They draw on its material history to reveal ideas relating to gender, labour, value, ecology, ancestral knowledge, and histories of oppression, extraction and trade.
Rather than dictating a chronological history of fibre art, the exhibition is organised in thematic dialogues between artists — across both generations and geographies — to explore how artists have embraced textiles to critique or push up against regimes of power. Some artists work alone with solitary, near-meditative practices, while others reflect the shared approach that the medium often invites, working with collaborators in acts of community and solidarity. Spanning intimate hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations, these artworks communicate multi-layered stories about lived experience, invoking the vital issues embedded in fibre and thread.
[*Barbican Centre]
Taken at the Barbican Centre
LJ Roberts
‘Jacqueline Mautner (Free CeCe)’, 2012
Embroidery on cotton
‘rosza daniel lang/levitsky at the New York City Dyke
March’, 2013
Embroidery on cotton
‘Frederick Weston’, 2018
Embroidery on cotton
LJ Roberts
Roberts embroiders their friends and loved ones in these small, intimate portraits that give visibility to the lives and activism of an intergenerational community of queer people. Jacqueline Mautner, depicted at a Drag March in the East Village, New York, sports a mascara moustache and shows her solidarity with CeCe McDonald, a transgender woman and activist who was incarcerated following a transphobic attack. rosza daniel lang/levitsky holds a placard among friends at the New York City Dyke March, while Frederick Weston prepares to raise awareness of the criminalisation of HIV at a Sunday Pride parade.
Roberts links the debasement of needlework as craft with the underrepresentation of queer people and their politics; these works reclaim both the people and the medium as worthy of attention and celebration. The works are displayed to show both the back and the front of the embroideries, which Roberts considers as important as each other. Behind every person or story is a messy underside, and the particular dissolves into a more universal web of connectedness.*
From the exhibition
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
(February – May 2024)
Textiles are vital to our lives. We are swaddled in them when we’re born, we wrap our bodies in them every day, and we’re shrouded in them when we die.
What does it mean to imagine a needle, a loom or a garment as a tool of resistance? How can textiles unpack, question, unspool, unravel and therefore reimagine the world around us?
Since the 1960s, textiles have become increasingly present in artistic practices for subversive ends. This is significant as the medium has been historically undervalued within the hierarchies of Western art history. Textiles have been considered ‘craft’ in opposition to definitions of ‘fine art’, gendered as feminine and marginalised by scholars and the art market. The 50 international artists in this show challenge these classifications, harnessing the medium to speak powerfully about intimate, everyday stories as well as wider socio-political narratives, teasing out these entangled concerns through a stitch, a knot, a braid, through the warp and the weft. These artists defy traditional expectations of textiles, embracing abstraction or figuration to push the boundaries of the medium. They draw on its material history to reveal ideas relating to gender, labour, value, ecology, ancestral knowledge, and histories of oppression, extraction and trade.
Rather than dictating a chronological history of fibre art, the exhibition is organised in thematic dialogues between artists — across both generations and geographies — to explore how artists have embraced textiles to critique or push up against regimes of power. Some artists work alone with solitary, near-meditative practices, while others reflect the shared approach that the medium often invites, working with collaborators in acts of community and solidarity. Spanning intimate hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations, these artworks communicate multi-layered stories about lived experience, invoking the vital issues embedded in fibre and thread.
[*Barbican Centre]
Taken at the Barbican Centre