Taking in a gorgeous sunset tonight over the city. I can never get tired of sunsets like these... Pic taken from around San Jose, CA. (Sunday around sunset, April 11, 2021; 7:34 p.m.)

*“The sun tells the best joke of a day full of them, setting so spectacularly that you can almost smell the tropical paradise lazing somewhere over this rim of endless, gray socialist towers. Miles of square windows explode orange, red, and purple, like a million TV sets broadcasting the apocalypse. Clouds unspool. The sky drains of birds.” ― Tod Wodicka, All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well.

Short Sicilian dystopian novel translated by Andrea G. Labinger which reminded me of Bartleby The Scrivener by Herman Melville a bit, which is by no means a recommendation!

As society breaks down, and helicopters overhead monitor the city for signs of discontent , the Clerk's internal monologue unspools describing his every action and thought, putting a favourable gloss on every action, however banal or unsavory.

He has a grand plan to escape his dull life and awful family but confides it to the boss's secretary/lover whithin earshot of the boss and is utterly humiliated and sacked, left to wander the streets as just another vagrant...

Not a very nice character, or a world I'd want to read more about.

Fresia y Caupolicán (Fresia and Caupolicán), 1964 – 65

Violeta Parra

Dyed jute fabric with embroidery

Parra was an activist, visual artist and renowned songwriter whose embroidered works are greatly informed by Latin America’s long histories of textile making. This artwork depicts a passage from La Araucana (The Auracaniad), an epic poem from the sixteenth century that narrates the Spanish conquest of Chile, focusing on the Arauco War fought between the Spaniards and the Mapuche people, an Indigenous group in Chile’s Araucanía region. In the passage, Caupolicán, a toqui — the name for Mapuche war leaders — is captured by the Spanish. Upon seeing that he allowed himself to be captured alive, his wife Fresia throws their child at his feet in a fit of rage.

Caupolicán, depicted in blue — a colour of great spiritual importance in Mapuche culture — is chained at the neck and ankles by a Spanish soldier who is depicted in green and black, while seven other soldiers look on. By depicting them in this act of barbarity Parra challenges the colonial notion that the Spanish were a civilising force.*

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

Male presenting a gift to the female.

Quote "Male nursery web spiders often woo potential lady-friends with gifts wrapped in silk. Mating may ensue, during which a female unspools the present, expecting to find a tasty treat. But the males can be unscrupulous. Some offerings contain inedible plant seeds or empty insect exoskeletons.

…The empty-handed males were mostly unsuccessful at mating. Whereas those with a gift could get the girl. But if the gift was worthless, the females quickly realized the deceit and pushed the copulating males off.

See more at: marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/gift-gi... " unquote.

Observing a stunning fiery sunset sky display over the city tonight. Just simply beautiful! These fiery sunsets never get old. Pic taken from around San Jose, CA. (Monday around late sunset, April 26, 2021; 7:55 p.m.)

*“The sun tells the best joke of a day full of them, setting so spectacularly that you can almost smell the tropical paradise lazing somewhere over this rim of endless, gray socialist towers. Miles of square windows explode orange, red, and purple, like a million TV sets broadcasting the apocalypse. Clouds unspool. The sky drains of birds.” – Tod Wodicka.

Silk factory - soaking the cocoons in warm water, finding the end, and starting to unspool them

A stunning sunset to end another spring day in the city. I can never get tired of sunsets like these... Pic taken from around San Jose, CA. (Sunday around sunset, April 11, 2021; 7:34 p.m.)

*“The sun tells the best joke of a day full of them, setting so spectacularly that you can almost smell the tropical paradise lazing somewhere over this rim of endless, gray socialist towers. Miles of square windows explode orange, red, and purple, like a million TV sets broadcasting the apocalypse. Clouds unspool. The sky drains of birds.” ― Tod Wodicka, All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well.

Wow, the sky was on fire with color tonight over the city! Don't you just love it when Mother Nature shows off her stunning sunset displays? Tonight's was totally one for the books. Pic taken from around San Jose, CA. (Monday around late sunset, April 26, 2021; 7:59 p.m.)

*“The sun tells the best joke of a day full of them, setting so spectacularly that you can almost smell the tropical paradise lazing somewhere over this rim of endless, gray socialist towers. Miles of square windows explode orange, red, and purple, like a million TV sets broadcasting the apocalypse. Clouds unspool. The sky drains of birds.” – Tod Wodicka.

Observing an unexpected fiery sunset unfold to end my Monday. Loving how the colors changed as the sunset progressed. Pics taken from around San Jose, CA. (Monday around sunset, February 15, 2021)

*“The sun tells the best joke of a day full of them, setting so spectacularly that you can almost smell the tropical paradise lazing somewhere over this rim of endless, gray socialist towers. Miles of square windows explode orange, red, and purple, like a million TV sets broadcasting the apocalypse. Clouds unspool. The sky drains of birds.” – Tod Wodicka

Just a little bit left. I ran out of 1/2" tubing. But it is too cold to unroll now (requires temps in the 80's and hours in the sun to unspool properly). So this bit will have to wait until spring.

You have to look at it here to watch the excitement unspool.

Fresia y Caupolicán (Fresia and Caupolicán), 1964 – 65

Violeta Parra

Dyed jute fabric with embroidery

Parra was an activist, visual artist and renowned songwriter whose embroidered works are greatly informed by Latin America’s long histories of textile making. This artwork depicts a passage from La Araucana (The Auracaniad), an epic poem from the sixteenth century that narrates the Spanish conquest of Chile, focusing on the Arauco War fought between the Spaniards and the Mapuche people, an Indigenous group in Chile’s Araucanía region. In the passage, Caupolicán, a toqui — the name for Mapuche war leaders — is captured by the Spanish. Upon seeing that he allowed himself to be captured alive, his wife Fresia throws their child at his feet in a fit of rage.

Caupolicán, depicted in blue — a colour of great spiritual importance in Mapuche culture — is chained at the neck and ankles by a Spanish soldier who is depicted in green and black, while seven other soldiers look on. By depicting them in this act of barbarity Parra challenges the colonial notion that the Spanish were a civilising force.*

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

Prism, 2018

Repurposed quilt, printed chiffon, polyester organza, printed polyester, polyester satin, polyester batting, nylon ribbon, vintage appliqués, vintage whimsies, vintage brass stamping, rhinestone appliqués, vintage beaded hair barrette, assorted glass, plastic and stone beads, artificial sinew and tipi poles

Speak to Me so That I Can Understand, 2018

Acrylic paint on canvas, vintage Seminole patchwork, plastic beads, glass beads, nylon, water-based ink on sublimated polyester, metal jingles, tipi poles and deer hide

We Play Endlessly, 2018

Neoprene, printed polyester, silk, printed chiffon, canvas, polyester satin, brass grommets, nylon ribbon, acrylic paint, polyester laces, glass and plastic beads, artificial sinew and tipi poles

People Like Us, 2019

Vinyl, neoprene, printed polyester, glass beads, brass grommets, nylon, printed cotton, acrylic paint, deer hide and tipi poles

Gibson draws on his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and the Native American women in his family whose textile work sustained them. These four works were partly inspired by garments worn by dancers in Native American powwow ceremonies, particularly those worn by the Northern Paiute people as spiritual protection in the pacifist Ghost Dance movement of the late nineteenth century. They also incorporate contemporary references: the phrase ‘People Like Us’ derives from a 1965 print by artist and nun Sister Corita Kent, while ‘We Play Endlessly’ pays homage to Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós. Gibson embraces hybridity, seeing his practice as ‘a mash-up of intertribal aesthetics’ in resistance to essentialist understandings of Indigeneity. Gibson links overcoming his rejection of craft as a student to coming to terms with his sexuality as a gay man. He highlights ‘the nonbinary gender roles found in many indigenous cultures’ and his garments are deliberately ungendered. Vibrating with colour, texture and animated potential, they have previously been installed hanging in procession-like formations, as shown here, or activated by performers.*

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

Prism, 2018

Repurposed quilt, printed chiffon, polyester organza, printed polyester, polyester satin, polyester batting, nylon ribbon, vintage appliqués, vintage whimsies, vintage brass stamping, rhinestone appliqués, vintage beaded hair barrette, assorted glass, plastic and stone beads, artificial sinew and tipi poles

Speak to Me so That I Can Understand, 2018

Acrylic paint on canvas, vintage Seminole patchwork, plastic beads, glass beads, nylon, water-based ink on sublimated polyester, metal jingles, tipi poles and deer hide

We Play Endlessly, 2018

Neoprene, printed polyester, silk, printed chiffon, canvas, polyester satin, brass grommets, nylon ribbon, acrylic paint, polyester laces, glass and plastic beads, artificial sinew and tipi poles

People Like Us, 2019

Vinyl, neoprene, printed polyester, glass beads, brass grommets, nylon, printed cotton, acrylic paint, deer hide and tipi poles

Gibson draws on his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and the Native American women in his family whose textile work sustained them. These four works were partly inspired by garments worn by dancers in Native American powwow ceremonies, particularly those worn by the Northern Paiute people as spiritual protection in the pacifist Ghost Dance movement of the late nineteenth century. They also incorporate contemporary references: the phrase ‘People Like Us’ derives from a 1965 print by artist and nun Sister Corita Kent, while ‘We Play Endlessly’ pays homage to Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós. Gibson embraces hybridity, seeing his practice as ‘a mash-up of intertribal aesthetics’ in resistance to essentialist understandings of Indigeneity. Gibson links overcoming his rejection of craft as a student to coming to terms with his sexuality as a gay man. He highlights ‘the nonbinary gender roles found in many indigenous cultures’ and his garments are deliberately ungendered. Vibrating with colour, texture and animated potential, they have previously been installed hanging in procession-like formations, as shown here, or activated by performers.*

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

Don't you just love it when Mother Nature shows off her stunning sunset displays? Tonight's was totally one for the books. Pic taken from around San Jose, CA. (Monday around sunset, April 26, 2021; 7:54 p.m.)

*“The sun tells the best joke of a day full of them, setting so spectacularly that you can almost smell the tropical paradise lazing somewhere over this rim of endless, gray socialist towers. Miles of square windows explode orange, red, and purple, like a million TV sets broadcasting the apocalypse. Clouds unspool. The sky drains of birds.” – Tod Wodicka.

Seeing a beautiful golden sunset sky display to end another spring day in the city. Just simply gorgeous! Pic taken from around San Jose, CA. (Monday around sunset, April 26, 2021; 7:50 p.m.)

*“The sun tells the best joke of a day full of them, setting so spectacularly that you can almost smell the tropical paradise lazing somewhere over this rim of endless, gray socialist towers. Miles of square windows explode orange, red, and purple, like a million TV sets broadcasting the apocalypse. Clouds unspool. The sky drains of birds.” – Tod Wodicka.

Prism, 2018

Repurposed quilt, printed chiffon, polyester organza, printed polyester, polyester satin, polyester batting, nylon ribbon, vintage appliqués, vintage whimsies, vintage brass stamping, rhinestone appliqués, vintage beaded hair barrette, assorted glass, plastic and stone beads, artificial sinew and tipi poles

Speak to Me so That I Can Understand, 2018

Acrylic paint on canvas, vintage Seminole patchwork, plastic beads, glass beads, nylon, water-based ink on sublimated polyester, metal jingles, tipi poles and deer hide

We Play Endlessly, 2018

Neoprene, printed polyester, silk, printed chiffon, canvas, polyester satin, brass grommets, nylon ribbon, acrylic paint, polyester laces, glass and plastic beads, artificial sinew and tipi poles

People Like Us, 2019

Vinyl, neoprene, printed polyester, glass beads, brass grommets, nylon, printed cotton, acrylic paint, deer hide and tipi poles

Gibson draws on his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and the Native American women in his family whose textile work sustained them. These four works were partly inspired by garments worn by dancers in Native American powwow ceremonies, particularly those worn by the Northern Paiute people as spiritual protection in the pacifist Ghost Dance movement of the late nineteenth century. They also incorporate contemporary references: the phrase ‘People Like Us’ derives from a 1965 print by artist and nun Sister Corita Kent, while ‘We Play Endlessly’ pays homage to Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós. Gibson embraces hybridity, seeing his practice as ‘a mash-up of intertribal aesthetics’ in resistance to essentialist understandings of Indigeneity. Gibson links overcoming his rejection of craft as a student to coming to terms with his sexuality as a gay man. He highlights ‘the nonbinary gender roles found in many indigenous cultures’ and his garments are deliberately ungendered. Vibrating with colour, texture and animated potential, they have previously been installed hanging in procession-like formations, as shown here, or activated by performers.*

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

“The sun tells the best joke of a day full of them, setting so spectacularly that you can almost smell the tropical paradise lazing somewhere over this rim of endless, gray socialist towers. Miles of square windows explode orange, red, and purple, like a million TV sets broadcasting the apocalypse. Clouds unspool. The sky drains of birds.”

― Tod Wodicka, All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well: A Novel

Cecilia Vicuña

Unspun wool and sound

Lengths of knotted, unspun wool stream down from the ceiling, accompanied by the sounds of Vicuña chanting poems related to water, for which thread is a metaphor in Andean culture. This monumental work, which Vicuña describes as a ‘poem in space’, embodies her deep engagement with the ancient Andean form of the quipu (meaning ‘knot’ in the Quechua language): a system of ‘writing’ with knots. This ritualistic way of communicating was understood to connect its makers to the cosmos.

In 1583, following the Spanish conquest, quipu were banned and ordered to be destroyed. For Vicuña, reviving the quipu is ‘an act of poetic resistance’ — it is ‘a way to remember, its potential involving the body and the cosmos at once.’

Quipu Austral was commissioned for the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012. Proposing the work as a ‘prayer for the union of the world’, Vicuña found poetic resonances between the ancient Indigenous peoples of South America and Australia, connecting their world views of exchange, equality and freedom.

This included the parallel oral traditions of the Andean concept of the cosmographic ceque (meaning ‘line’) and the Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’ songlines, as metaphysical maps honouring the life-giving force of earth, water and song. The vibrant colours of the wool are based on the hues prevalent in both Aboriginal Australian rock paintings and Andean weavings. Vicuña describes the unspun wool as embodying fertility and symbolizing the ‘not yet’ state from which everything is born.*

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

An unexpected fiery sunset unfolding to end my Monday. Loving how the colors changed as the sunset progressed. Pics taken from around San Jose, CA. (Monday around sunset, February 15, 2021)

*“The sun tells the best joke of a day full of them, setting so spectacularly that you can almost smell the tropical paradise lazing somewhere over this rim of endless, gray socialist towers. Miles of square windows explode orange, red, and purple, like a million TV sets broadcasting the apocalypse. Clouds unspool. The sky drains of birds.” – Tod Wodicka

A roll of film unspools below the sign for the late, lamented Visions Cinema. 1927 Florida Ave NW, Washington, DC.

See also Now Showing.

From EA and Swedish developer Coldwood comes a physics-based puzzle-platformer in which you control Yarny, a tiny yarn golem. Using his own string, which unspools from his body as he runs, Yarny can swing across gaps, fly kites, ensnare and pull objects, and even tie himself to things like fish and allow himself to be pulled behind them.

gameofbattle.com/blog/yarn-based-lifeform-solves-puzzles-...

From the series Wyjscie z Egiptu (Out of Egypt), 2021

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas

Textile, acrylic paint and mixed media on wooden stretcher

Mirga-Tas stitches found fabrics — clothing, curtains and sheets — into vibrant patchworks that tell quotidian stories of Roma people. They often cover walls or are displayed in groups, presenting — at human or larger-than life scale — narrative scenes that reveal both public and private aspects of Roma existence. In this work, she presents a snapshot of everyday life: women mend clothes, hang laundry and play cards.

This work was made in response to a print by the seventeenth century engraver Jacques Collot, who depicted Roma people as outcasts. His representations perpetuated commonly-held stereotypes of Roma people as impoverished travellers.

Mirga-Tas resists these associations, instead offering a positive iconography of Roma people today in which women exist in community with each other. For the artist, the fabrics carry intimate memories: ‘I personally feel moved when I see the scraps of material, knowing whom they came from, what I remember and associate with them, and whom they belonged to’.*

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

Prism, 2018

Repurposed quilt, printed chiffon, polyester organza, printed polyester, polyester satin, polyester batting, nylon ribbon, vintage appliqués, vintage whimsies, vintage brass stamping, rhinestone appliqués, vintage beaded hair barrette, assorted glass, plastic and stone beads, artificial sinew and tipi poles

Speak to Me so That I Can Understand, 2018

Acrylic paint on canvas, vintage Seminole patchwork, plastic beads, glass beads, nylon, water-based ink on sublimated polyester, metal jingles, tipi poles and deer hide

We Play Endlessly, 2018

Neoprene, printed polyester, silk, printed chiffon, canvas, polyester satin, brass grommets, nylon ribbon, acrylic paint, polyester laces, glass and plastic beads, artificial sinew and tipi poles

People Like Us, 2019

Vinyl, neoprene, printed polyester, glass beads, brass grommets, nylon, printed cotton, acrylic paint, deer hide and tipi poles

Gibson draws on his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and the Native American women in his family whose textile work sustained them. These four works were partly inspired by garments worn by dancers in Native American powwow ceremonies, particularly those worn by the Northern Paiute people as spiritual protection in the pacifist Ghost Dance movement of the late nineteenth century. They also incorporate contemporary references: the phrase ‘People Like Us’ derives from a 1965 print by artist and nun Sister Corita Kent, while ‘We Play Endlessly’ pays homage to Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós. Gibson embraces hybridity, seeing his practice as ‘a mash-up of intertribal aesthetics’ in resistance to essentialist understandings of Indigeneity. Gibson links overcoming his rejection of craft as a student to coming to terms with his sexuality as a gay man. He highlights ‘the nonbinary gender roles found in many indigenous cultures’ and his garments are deliberately ungendered. Vibrating with colour, texture and animated potential, they have previously been installed hanging in procession-like formations, as shown here, or activated by performers.*

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

From the series Wyjscie z Egiptu (Out of Egypt), 2021

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas

Textile, acrylic paint and mixed media on wooden stretcher

Mirga-Tas stitches found fabrics — clothing, curtains and sheets — into vibrant patchworks that tell quotidian stories of Roma people. They often cover walls or are displayed in groups, presenting — at human or larger-than life scale — narrative scenes that reveal both public and private aspects of Roma existence. In this work, she presents a snapshot of everyday life: women mend clothes, hang laundry and play cards.

This work was made in response to a print by the seventeenth century engraver Jacques Collot, who depicted Roma people as outcasts. His representations perpetuated commonly-held stereotypes of Roma people as impoverished travellers.

Mirga-Tas resists these associations, instead offering a positive iconography of Roma people today in which women exist in community with each other. For the artist, the fabrics carry intimate memories: ‘I personally feel moved when I see the scraps of material, knowing whom they came from, what I remember and associate with them, and whom they belonged to’.*

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

From the series Wyjscie z Egiptu (Out of Egypt), 2021

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas

Textile, acrylic paint and mixed media on wooden stretcher

Mirga-Tas stitches found fabrics — clothing, curtains and sheets — into vibrant patchworks that tell quotidian stories of Roma people. They often cover walls or are displayed in groups, presenting — at human or larger-than life scale — narrative scenes that reveal both public and private aspects of Roma existence. In this work, she presents a snapshot of everyday life: women mend clothes, hang laundry and play cards.

This work was made in response to a print by the seventeenth century engraver Jacques Collot, who depicted Roma people as outcasts. His representations perpetuated commonly-held stereotypes of Roma people as impoverished travellers.

Mirga-Tas resists these associations, instead offering a positive iconography of Roma people today in which women exist in community with each other. For the artist, the fabrics carry intimate memories: ‘I personally feel moved when I see the scraps of material, knowing whom they came from, what I remember and associate with them, and whom they belonged to’.*

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

Cecilia Vicuña

Unspun wool and sound

Lengths of knotted, unspun wool stream down from the ceiling, accompanied by the sounds of Vicuña chanting poems related to water, for which thread is a metaphor in Andean culture. This monumental work, which Vicuña describes as a ‘poem in space’, embodies her deep engagement with the ancient Andean form of the quipu (meaning ‘knot’ in the Quechua language): a system of ‘writing’ with knots. This ritualistic way of communicating was understood to connect its makers to the cosmos.

In 1583, following the Spanish conquest, quipu were banned and ordered to be destroyed. For Vicuña, reviving the quipu is ‘an act of poetic resistance’ — it is ‘a way to remember, its potential involving the body and the cosmos at once.’

Quipu Austral was commissioned for the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012. Proposing the work as a ‘prayer for the union of the world’, Vicuña found poetic resonances between the ancient Indigenous peoples of South America and Australia, connecting their world views of exchange, equality and freedom.

This included the parallel oral traditions of the Andean concept of the cosmographic ceque (meaning ‘line’) and the Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’ songlines, as metaphysical maps honouring the life-giving force of earth, water and song. The vibrant colours of the wool are based on the hues prevalent in both Aboriginal Australian rock paintings and Andean weavings. Vicuña describes the unspun wool as embodying fertility and symbolizing the ‘not yet’ state from which everything is born.*

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

From the series Wyjscie z Egiptu (Out of Egypt), 2021

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas

Textile, acrylic paint and mixed media on wooden stretcher

Mirga-Tas stitches found fabrics — clothing, curtains and sheets — into vibrant patchworks that tell quotidian stories of Roma people. They often cover walls or are displayed in groups, presenting — at human or larger-than life scale — narrative scenes that reveal both public and private aspects of Roma existence. In this work, she presents a snapshot of everyday life: women mend clothes, hang laundry and play cards.

This work was made in response to a print by the seventeenth century engraver Jacques Collot, who depicted Roma people as outcasts. His representations perpetuated commonly-held stereotypes of Roma people as impoverished travellers.

Mirga-Tas resists these associations, instead offering a positive iconography of Roma people today in which women exist in community with each other. For the artist, the fabrics carry intimate memories: ‘I personally feel moved when I see the scraps of material, knowing whom they came from, what I remember and associate with them, and whom they belonged to’.*

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

by Igshaan Adams

Gebedswolke (Prayer Clouds), 2021 – 23

Gold and silver link chain, copper wire and cotton twine, gold wire, gold chain and spray paint, polyester braid, silver memory wire, metal charms, copper, brass and silver wire, wood, plastic and crystal beads, cowrie and sea snail shells, galvanised steel and wood centre, gold and silver link chain and clear lacquer spray paint

Paypakkies Groei Nog Op Die Wingerde (Paypackets still growing on the vines), 2022

Wood, plastic, glass, metal beads, nickel-plated charms, gold memory wire and copper wire, steel, nylon and polyester braided rope, cotton ribbon

Heideveld, 2021

Wood, painted wood, plastic, glass, stone, precious stone, metal and bone beads, shells, nylon and polyester rope, cotton fabrics, wire and cotton twine

This installation by Igshaan Adams grows out of his expanded practice of weaving and his exploration of so called ‘desire lines’ in post-Apartheid South Africa, the informal pathways that are created over time through footfall, often acting as shortcuts. He understands these lines as ‘symbolic of a collective act of resistance by a community who have historically been segregated and marginalised through spatial planning. Intentionally or not, these pathways remain symbolic of carving out one’s own path, collectively or individually’.*

Borderlands

A ‘borderland’, according to the scholar Gloria E. Anzaldúa, is a ‘vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary’. Borderlands are spaces where two or more cultures meet, where different social classes encounter each other, where people of different races inhabit the same locales.

The artists in this section move beyond a border being a boundary that separates ‘us’ from ‘them’. Instead, they ask how borderlands — as emotionally charged spaces — might be sites for profound creativity. In what ways can the language of cartography and the aesthetics of borders be appropriated to subvert power? And what happens when borders are transgressed? Through varied textile practices, the artists Igshaan Adams, Cian Dayrit, T. Vinoja, Margarita Cabrera and Kimsooja try to understand, reject, embrace, keep alive or question borders, but above all they attempt to transcend them to find a new way of being.*

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

by Igshaan Adams

Gebedswolke (Prayer Clouds), 2021 – 23

Gold and silver link chain, copper wire and cotton twine, gold wire, gold chain and spray paint, polyester braid, silver memory wire, metal charms, copper, brass and silver wire, wood, plastic and crystal beads, cowrie and sea snail shells, galvanised steel and wood centre, gold and silver link chain and clear lacquer spray paint

Paypakkies Groei Nog Op Die Wingerde (Paypackets still growing on the vines), 2022

Wood, plastic, glass, metal beads, nickel-plated charms, gold memory wire and copper wire, steel, nylon and polyester braided rope, cotton ribbon

Heideveld, 2021

Wood, painted wood, plastic, glass, stone, precious stone, metal and bone beads, shells, nylon and polyester rope, cotton fabrics, wire and cotton twine

This installation by Igshaan Adams grows out of his expanded practice of weaving and his exploration of so called ‘desire lines’ in post-Apartheid South Africa, the informal pathways that are created over time through footfall, often acting as shortcuts. He understands these lines as ‘symbolic of a collective act of resistance by a community who have historically been segregated and marginalised through spatial planning. Intentionally or not, these pathways remain symbolic of carving out one’s own path, collectively or individually’.*

Borderlands

A ‘borderland’, according to the scholar Gloria E. Anzaldúa, is a ‘vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary’. Borderlands are spaces where two or more cultures meet, where different social classes encounter each other, where people of different races inhabit the same locales.

The artists in this section move beyond a border being a boundary that separates ‘us’ from ‘them’. Instead, they ask how borderlands — as emotionally charged spaces — might be sites for profound creativity. In what ways can the language of cartography and the aesthetics of borders be appropriated to subvert power? And what happens when borders are transgressed? Through varied textile practices, the artists Igshaan Adams, Cian Dayrit, T. Vinoja, Margarita Cabrera and Kimsooja try to understand, reject, embrace, keep alive or question borders, but above all they attempt to transcend them to find a new way of being.*

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

One long tapeworm. Right next to the specimen is a thin white rope that you can unspool to get a feel for its actual length. It's long!

Faith Ringgold

Silkscreen on silk

This is one of Ringgold’s ‘story quilts’, partly made in response to her autobiography being rejected by a publisher. Textiles offered her a platform to tell her own stories. She draws on a rich tradition of African American women quiltmakers, including her great-great grandmother Susie Shannon, who had been born into enslavement in antebellum Florida and had produced quilts for plantation owners. Ringgold was also influenced by fifteenth-century Tibetan and Nepalese thangka paintings, whose rollable scroll form she saw as a solution to the challenge of moving, storing and transporting paintings. Textiles were a means for creative autonomy, both practically and conceptually.

This quilt charts the story of Cassie Louise Lightfoot, who dreams of the stars lifting her up from her family’s Harlem rooftop (‘Tar Beach’) to fly over the George Washington Bridge. The text reveals the conditions of Cassie’s life, including the financial pressures on her family and the discrimination they faced. For Ringgold, textiles can hold defiant stories of agency in the face of oppression. Cassie’s magical power of flying means that ‘I am free to go wherever I want to for the rest of my life’.*

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

Cecilia Vicuña

Unspun wool and sound

Lengths of knotted, unspun wool stream down from the ceiling, accompanied by the sounds of Vicuña chanting poems related to water, for which thread is a metaphor in Andean culture. This monumental work, which Vicuña describes as a ‘poem in space’, embodies her deep engagement with the ancient Andean form of the quipu (meaning ‘knot’ in the Quechua language): a system of ‘writing’ with knots. This ritualistic way of communicating was understood to connect its makers to the cosmos.

In 1583, following the Spanish conquest, quipu were banned and ordered to be destroyed. For Vicuña, reviving the quipu is ‘an act of poetic resistance’ — it is ‘a way to remember, its potential involving the body and the cosmos at once.’

Quipu Austral was commissioned for the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012. Proposing the work as a ‘prayer for the union of the world’, Vicuña found poetic resonances between the ancient Indigenous peoples of South America and Australia, connecting their world views of exchange, equality and freedom.

This included the parallel oral traditions of the Andean concept of the cosmographic ceque (meaning ‘line’) and the Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’ songlines, as metaphysical maps honouring the life-giving force of earth, water and song. The vibrant colours of the wool are based on the hues prevalent in both Aboriginal Australian rock paintings and Andean weavings. Vicuña describes the unspun wool as embodying fertility and symbolizing the ‘not yet’ state from which everything is born.*

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

Cecilia Vicuña

Unspun wool and sound

Lengths of knotted, unspun wool stream down from the ceiling, accompanied by the sounds of Vicuña chanting poems related to water, for which thread is a metaphor in Andean culture. This monumental work, which Vicuña describes as a ‘poem in space’, embodies her deep engagement with the ancient Andean form of the quipu (meaning ‘knot’ in the Quechua language): a system of ‘writing’ with knots. This ritualistic way of communicating was understood to connect its makers to the cosmos.

In 1583, following the Spanish conquest, quipu were banned and ordered to be destroyed. For Vicuña, reviving the quipu is ‘an act of poetic resistance’ — it is ‘a way to remember, its potential involving the body and the cosmos at once.’

Quipu Austral was commissioned for the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012. Proposing the work as a ‘prayer for the union of the world’, Vicuña found poetic resonances between the ancient Indigenous peoples of South America and Australia, connecting their world views of exchange, equality and freedom.

This included the parallel oral traditions of the Andean concept of the cosmographic ceque (meaning ‘line’) and the Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’ songlines, as metaphysical maps honouring the life-giving force of earth, water and song. The vibrant colours of the wool are based on the hues prevalent in both Aboriginal Australian rock paintings and Andean weavings. Vicuña describes the unspun wool as embodying fertility and symbolizing the ‘not yet’ state from which everything is born.*

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

“The sun tells the best joke of a day full of them, setting so spectacularly that you can almost smell the tropical paradise lazing somewhere over this rim of endless, gray socialist towers. Miles of square windows explode orange, red, and purple, like a million TV sets broadcasting the apocalypse. Clouds unspool. The sky drains of birds.”

― Tod Wodicka, All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well: A Novel

Cecilia Vicuña

Unspun wool and sound

Lengths of knotted, unspun wool stream down from the ceiling, accompanied by the sounds of Vicuña chanting poems related to water, for which thread is a metaphor in Andean culture. This monumental work, which Vicuña describes as a ‘poem in space’, embodies her deep engagement with the ancient Andean form of the quipu (meaning ‘knot’ in the Quechua language): a system of ‘writing’ with knots. This ritualistic way of communicating was understood to connect its makers to the cosmos.

In 1583, following the Spanish conquest, quipu were banned and ordered to be destroyed. For Vicuña, reviving the quipu is ‘an act of poetic resistance’ — it is ‘a way to remember, its potential involving the body and the cosmos at once.’

Quipu Austral was commissioned for the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012. Proposing the work as a ‘prayer for the union of the world’, Vicuña found poetic resonances between the ancient Indigenous peoples of South America and Australia, connecting their world views of exchange, equality and freedom.

This included the parallel oral traditions of the Andean concept of the cosmographic ceque (meaning ‘line’) and the Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’ songlines, as metaphysical maps honouring the life-giving force of earth, water and song. The vibrant colours of the wool are based on the hues prevalent in both Aboriginal Australian rock paintings and Andean weavings. Vicuña describes the unspun wool as embodying fertility and symbolizing the ‘not yet’ state from which everything is born.*

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

View of the winch and "quick release" for the portcullis. Tapping the bar slightly causes the winch to unspool and the portcullis RAPIDLY falls.

by Igshaan Adams

Gebedswolke (Prayer Clouds), 2021 – 23

Gold and silver link chain, copper wire and cotton twine, gold wire, gold chain and spray paint, polyester braid, silver memory wire, metal charms, copper, brass and silver wire, wood, plastic and crystal beads, cowrie and sea snail shells, galvanised steel and wood centre, gold and silver link chain and clear lacquer spray paint

Paypakkies Groei Nog Op Die Wingerde (Paypackets still growing on the vines), 2022

Wood, plastic, glass, metal beads, nickel-plated charms, gold memory wire and copper wire, steel, nylon and polyester braided rope, cotton ribbon

Heideveld, 2021

Wood, painted wood, plastic, glass, stone, precious stone, metal and bone beads, shells, nylon and polyester rope, cotton fabrics, wire and cotton twine

This installation by Igshaan Adams grows out of his expanded practice of weaving and his exploration of so called ‘desire lines’ in post-Apartheid South Africa, the informal pathways that are created over time through footfall, often acting as shortcuts. He understands these lines as ‘symbolic of a collective act of resistance by a community who have historically been segregated and marginalised through spatial planning. Intentionally or not, these pathways remain symbolic of carving out one’s own path, collectively or individually’.*

Borderlands

A ‘borderland’, according to the scholar Gloria E. Anzaldúa, is a ‘vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary’. Borderlands are spaces where two or more cultures meet, where different social classes encounter each other, where people of different races inhabit the same locales.

The artists in this section move beyond a border being a boundary that separates ‘us’ from ‘them’. Instead, they ask how borderlands — as emotionally charged spaces — might be sites for profound creativity. In what ways can the language of cartography and the aesthetics of borders be appropriated to subvert power? And what happens when borders are transgressed? Through varied textile practices, the artists Igshaan Adams, Cian Dayrit, T. Vinoja, Margarita Cabrera and Kimsooja try to understand, reject, embrace, keep alive or question borders, but above all they attempt to transcend them to find a new way of being.*

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

‘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

Yinka Shonibare CBE RA

Mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile and globe

Shonibare references the history of brightly coloured Dutch wax fabrics to comment on colonisation, hybridity, and authenticity. The fabric originated in Indonesia before being produced by the Dutch in Manchester and sold for mass consumption in Africa. He began using the material in the 1990s after one of his teachers commented that Shonibare, an artist of African origin, was not making ‘authentic’ African art.

Boy on a Globe addresses the ways in which humanity has exerted power over the world it occupies, often with disastrous consequences. The globe, yellow in tone and reddening in certain sections to indicate warming, is a dual symbol for environmental disaster and the redrawing of territory under Empire. The boy is perilously perched, as though about to fall. This sense of precarity offers a visual manifestation of the deconstruction of colonisation and empire, countering the ideas of stability and linear, forward progression that justified colonial missions.*

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

From the series Wyjscie z Egiptu (Out of Egypt), 2021

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas

Textile, acrylic paint and mixed media on wooden stretcher

Mirga-Tas stitches found fabrics — clothing, curtains and sheets — into vibrant patchworks that tell quotidian stories of Roma people. They often cover walls or are displayed in groups, presenting — at human or larger-than life scale — narrative scenes that reveal both public and private aspects of Roma existence. In this work, she presents a snapshot of everyday life: women mend clothes, hang laundry and play cards.

This work was made in response to a print by the seventeenth century engraver Jacques Collot, who depicted Roma people as outcasts. His representations perpetuated commonly-held stereotypes of Roma people as impoverished travellers.

Mirga-Tas resists these associations, instead offering a positive iconography of Roma people today in which women exist in community with each other. For the artist, the fabrics carry intimate memories: ‘I personally feel moved when I see the scraps of material, knowing whom they came from, what I remember and associate with them, and whom they belonged to’.*

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

by Margarita Cabrera

Nopal (Christina Zarate), from the series ‘Space in Between’, 2016

US Border Patrol uniform, copper wire, PVC pipe, foam, thread and terracotta pot

Nopal (Wendy F.V.), from the series ‘Space in Between’, 2016

US Border Patrol uniform, copper wire, PVC pipe, foam, thread and terracotta pot

Pipe Organ (Rony P.L.), from the series ‘Space in Between’, 2016

US Border Patrol uniform, copper wire, PVC pipe, foam, thread and terracotta pot

In the Space in Between series, Cabrera extends her exploration of US-Mexico migratory politics using soft sculpture. These interpretations of cacti indigenous to the Southwestern United States are made from discarded US Border Patrol uniforms. They were made collaboratively, in workshops where largely Spanish-speaking communities recounted their immigration stories and embroidered them onto the sculptures. The participants were taught Otomí embroidery, a sewing technique indigenous to the Otomí people of central Mexico, as an effort to maintain a relationship to cultural traditions from Mexico in the USA. The colourful depictions of homes, peoples, national flags, Catholic imagery and celestial bodies contrast with the connotation of the uniforms, which for some stand for security and safety, while for others they invoke feelings of fear, resistance and histories of violence.

The series is titled after the Aztec word nepantla, which refers to places of transition and ‘spaces in between’ — suggesting a symbolic landscape where the relationships of people across divides are renegotiated.*

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

Yinka Shonibare CBE RA

Mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile and globe

Shonibare references the history of brightly coloured Dutch wax fabrics to comment on colonisation, hybridity, and authenticity. The fabric originated in Indonesia before being produced by the Dutch in Manchester and sold for mass consumption in Africa. He began using the material in the 1990s after one of his teachers commented that Shonibare, an artist of African origin, was not making ‘authentic’ African art.

Boy on a Globe addresses the ways in which humanity has exerted power over the world it occupies, often with disastrous consequences. The globe, yellow in tone and reddening in certain sections to indicate warming, is a dual symbol for environmental disaster and the redrawing of territory under Empire. The boy is perilously perched, as though about to fall. This sense of precarity offers a visual manifestation of the deconstruction of colonisation and empire, countering the ideas of stability and linear, forward progression that justified colonial missions.*

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

Sanford Biggers

Antique quilt, assorted textiles and acrylic

Biggers is interested in ‘codeswitching’, the ways in which people — often people from the global majority — change their behaviour in different contexts, not to fit in, but to survive. This work draws upon the contested history of quilts being used as ‘code’ to signpost routes for enslaved freedom seekers travelling on the Underground Railroad in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The colours and patterns on the quilts potentially indicated which way togo, where was safe and where was dangerous.

Biggers sees the pre-existing quilt patterns as a first layer of ‘code’ and his interventions as ‘another layer of code to be deciphered somewhere in the future.’ This work uses an antique quilt with a ‘bricklayer’ pattern similar to that used by Loretta Pettway. Sewn, cut and painted patterns collide in an optical illusion. The eye-bending intervention of clashing signs and patterns suggests that code is dynamically being written and rewritten in the continual present. What we see shifts; the visuals are as slippery as history itself.*

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

Prism, 2018

Repurposed quilt, printed chiffon, polyester organza, printed polyester, polyester satin, polyester batting, nylon ribbon, vintage appliqués, vintage whimsies, vintage brass stamping, rhinestone appliqués, vintage beaded hair barrette, assorted glass, plastic and stone beads, artificial sinew and tipi poles

Speak to Me so That I Can Understand, 2018

Acrylic paint on canvas, vintage Seminole patchwork, plastic beads, glass beads, nylon, water-based ink on sublimated polyester, metal jingles, tipi poles and deer hide

We Play Endlessly, 2018

Neoprene, printed polyester, silk, printed chiffon, canvas, polyester satin, brass grommets, nylon ribbon, acrylic paint, polyester laces, glass and plastic beads, artificial sinew and tipi poles

People Like Us, 2019

Vinyl, neoprene, printed polyester, glass beads, brass grommets, nylon, printed cotton, acrylic paint, deer hide and tipi poles

Gibson draws on his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and the Native American women in his family whose textile work sustained them. These four works were partly inspired by garments worn by dancers in Native American powwow ceremonies, particularly those worn by the Northern Paiute people as spiritual protection in the pacifist Ghost Dance movement of the late nineteenth century. They also incorporate contemporary references: the phrase ‘People Like Us’ derives from a 1965 print by artist and nun Sister Corita Kent, while ‘We Play Endlessly’ pays homage to Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós. Gibson embraces hybridity, seeing his practice as ‘a mash-up of intertribal aesthetics’ in resistance to essentialist understandings of Indigeneity. Gibson links overcoming his rejection of craft as a student to coming to terms with his sexuality as a gay man. He highlights ‘the nonbinary gender roles found in many indigenous cultures’ and his garments are deliberately ungendered. Vibrating with colour, texture and animated potential, they have previously been installed hanging in procession-like formations, as shown here, or activated by performers.*

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

Sanford Biggers

Antique quilt, assorted textiles and acrylic

Biggers is interested in ‘codeswitching’, the ways in which people — often people from the global majority — change their behaviour in different contexts, not to fit in, but to survive. This work draws upon the contested history of quilts being used as ‘code’ to signpost routes for enslaved freedom seekers travelling on the Underground Railroad in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The colours and patterns on the quilts potentially indicated which way togo, where was safe and where was dangerous.

Biggers sees the pre-existing quilt patterns as a first layer of ‘code’ and his interventions as ‘another layer of code to be deciphered somewhere in the future.’ This work uses an antique quilt with a ‘bricklayer’ pattern similar to that used by Loretta Pettway. Sewn, cut and painted patterns collide in an optical illusion. The eye-bending intervention of clashing signs and patterns suggests that code is dynamically being written and rewritten in the continual present. What we see shifts; the visuals are as slippery as history itself.*

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

Hannah Ryggen

Wool and linen

This tapestry addresses the atrocities of the US invasion of Vietnam (1955—75), about which Ryggen learned from the left-leaning newspaper Dagbladet, delivered daily to her remote home in rural Ørlandet, Norway. The work is a searing indictment of the USA’s brutal role, directly implicating then president Lyndon B. Johnson. Wearing a cowboy hat, Johnson presides over a landscape of lush green fields intersected by a fiery red grid, making visible a Vietnamese landscape devastated by bloodshed. The forms become almost abstract, grappling with the indescribable nature of the horrors.

Ryggen primarily used local plants to dye her yarn; however, this was the only work in which she used artificial dye, to achieve the blood-red colour. Most of her tapestries also exploit the graphic pictorial potential of the tight weave achieved by a loom. However, here the green squares are tufted, their loose texture directly contrasting the authoritarian Johnson opposite. This anti-war work followed a series of tapestries Ryggen made in the 1940s and 1950s that critiqued fascism in various global contexts. These were all created directly on the loom, with no preparatory sketches.*

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