Lady’s Dreams or Stop Right There Gentlemen!, 2019
Mercedes Azpilicueta
Cotton and wool jacquard textile
Azpilicueta frequently reclaims the form of the monumental tapestry — a medium traditionally used to convey ‘grand’ patriarchal narratives — to dismantle rigid (often colonial) histories. Here she pays tribute to a protofeminist retelling of the colonial myth of Lucía Miranda, a white woman captured by the Indigenous population of what is now known as Argentina. Argentinian writer Eduarda Mansilla reframed the popular legend in her 1860 novel Lucía Miranda, in which she instilled both the titular character and the Indigenous people with agency, building bonds and exchanging knowledge.
Mansilla herself rejected societal norms as a traveller, translator and educator.
Imagining a fictional dialogue between herself, Lucía and Mansilla, Azpilicueta depicts a panoramic landscape populated by women who defy gendered stereotypes and seek ‘alternative ways of life’. The digitally created composition was woven on an industrial jacquard loom in the Netherlands. The surreal scene pays homage to Latin America’s literary tradition of magical realism, while details like the ‘vanishing’ women floating in the upper half of the tapestry tells of their systematic erasure from history.*
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
Lady’s Dreams or Stop Right There Gentlemen!, 2019
Mercedes Azpilicueta
Cotton and wool jacquard textile
Azpilicueta frequently reclaims the form of the monumental tapestry — a medium traditionally used to convey ‘grand’ patriarchal narratives — to dismantle rigid (often colonial) histories. Here she pays tribute to a protofeminist retelling of the colonial myth of Lucía Miranda, a white woman captured by the Indigenous population of what is now known as Argentina. Argentinian writer Eduarda Mansilla reframed the popular legend in her 1860 novel Lucía Miranda, in which she instilled both the titular character and the Indigenous people with agency, building bonds and exchanging knowledge.
Mansilla herself rejected societal norms as a traveller, translator and educator.
Imagining a fictional dialogue between herself, Lucía and Mansilla, Azpilicueta depicts a panoramic landscape populated by women who defy gendered stereotypes and seek ‘alternative ways of life’. The digitally created composition was woven on an industrial jacquard loom in the Netherlands. The surreal scene pays homage to Latin America’s literary tradition of magical realism, while details like the ‘vanishing’ women floating in the upper half of the tapestry tells of their systematic erasure from history.*
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