View allAll Photos Tagged Unspool
View of the winch and "quick release" for the portcullis. Tapping the bar slightly causes the winch to unspool and the portcullis RAPIDLY falls.
‘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 Otomà embroidery, a sewing technique indigenous to the Otomà 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
Set during the waning days of World War II, this resonant Italian allegory unspools through the eyes of a 6-year-old girl (Sabina Vannucchi) who chronicles the exodus from her Tuscan village, the coming of the Allies and the clash between the peasants and the fascists. Omero Antonutti co-stars as Galvano, who leads a small band of refugees into the hills to escape the vindictive Nazis and look for the forces of liberation.
Maha Mohan
MFA Ceramics 2025
"Echoes of Longing"
Porcelain, metal, wax
Echoes of Longing, Epilogue: the room, again
I return to the room I’ve never stood in,
but have always carried in the hollow between ribs.
The walls remember.
They do not speak in words,
but in breath, in the weight of air,
in the scent of jasmine and wet earth.
There is a mat where a body once lay —
giving birth, giving silence, giving up.
There is a corner where creatures sleep,
watchful with eyes of clay and salt.
A thread unspools across the floor,
trailing stories never spoken aloud.
The room is not built —
it is conjured.
Each object placed like an offering,
each fragment of ceramic a broken sentence
searching for its mother tongue — a belonging,
to be loved.
This is not a reconstruction.
This is a haunting.
A memory-play staged by grief,
with clay limbs, stitched cloth,
and the echo of a name I once called out
in the middle of a dream.
You may enter.
But leave your resolution at the door.
The room is still listening.
The room remembers you too.
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
Zamthingla Ruivah
Handwoven wool
In 1986 a young woman in Northern India named Luingamla, a friend of the artist, was murdered by army officers who attempted to rape her. The officers walked free due to a law, a remnant of British colonial rule, that meant that armed forces were immune from being tried in civil courts. Student groups and the Tangkhul Shanao Long (Tangkhul Women’s Association) rallied to bring a case before the courts. They won the case in 1990, four years after her murder.
Ruivah wove this keshan — a woollen sarong worn by men and women in the Naga Hills of Manipur, northeast India — to commemorate Luingamla’s path to justice. Since then, the design has been passed down through Naga communities across the region, with more than 6,000 women having produced over 15,000 of them. They have become a symbol of solidarity with the Naga resistance movement and the fight against state violence towards women.*
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
Pa Pouvwa Gran Mèt la Mèt Jean Simon Britus Grann Brigitte Capitaine Jean Zombi Se Nonm Sa yo ki mèt et mètres 4 kwen ak mitan simitye (By the Power of the Almighty, Jean Simon Britus, Grann Brigitte and Captain Jean Zombi are Masters and Mistresses of the Four Corners and Centre of the Cemetery), 2014 –17
Myrlande Constant
Sequins and beads on cotton
Constant has transformed the practice of making drapo Vodou. In Haiti, these flags, depicting the spirits (or Iwa), were typically embellished with sequins; Constant incorporates beads, a finer material that allows her to capture light, movement and perspective with a complexity previously unseen in the artform.
In this drapo, Constant, whose father was a Vodou priest, sews a complex cemetery scene. At the centre of the composition, Bawon Samdi and Grann Brijit, the lwa of the dead, storm a cemetery on horseback while their hands hold whips hoisted into the air to strike figures in red and black. These are the malefektè (transgressors) who are attempting to capture zonbi — a body or spirit that is raised from the dead and forced to obey the reviver, usually carrying out manual labour or acts of criminality on their behalf.
In Vodou, the zonbi embody exploitative labour, and the ropes that bind them are a direct reference to enslavement. For some who follow this religion, the capturing and use of Zonbi has ambiguous moral implications. In this scene, Constant asserts that the dead should not be exploited.*
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
Pa Pouvwa Gran Mèt la Mèt Jean Simon Britus Grann Brigitte Capitaine Jean Zombi Se Nonm Sa yo ki mèt et mètres 4 kwen ak mitan simitye (By the Power of the Almighty, Jean Simon Britus, Grann Brigitte and Captain Jean Zombi are Masters and Mistresses of the Four Corners and Centre of the Cemetery), 2014 –17
Myrlande Constant
Sequins and beads on cotton
Constant has transformed the practice of making drapo Vodou. In Haiti, these flags, depicting the spirits (or Iwa), were typically embellished with sequins; Constant incorporates beads, a finer material that allows her to capture light, movement and perspective with a complexity previously unseen in the artform.
In this drapo, Constant, whose father was a Vodou priest, sews a complex cemetery scene. At the centre of the composition, Bawon Samdi and Grann Brijit, the lwa of the dead, storm a cemetery on horseback while their hands hold whips hoisted into the air to strike figures in red and black. These are the malefektè (transgressors) who are attempting to capture zonbi — a body or spirit that is raised from the dead and forced to obey the reviver, usually carrying out manual labour or acts of criminality on their behalf.
In Vodou, the zonbi embody exploitative labour, and the ropes that bind them are a direct reference to enslavement. For some who follow this religion, the capturing and use of Zonbi has ambiguous moral implications. In this scene, Constant asserts that the dead should not be exploited.*
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
Hand-stitched silk collage
Billie Zangewa
Zangewa states that she is ‘reclaiming my identity, my feminine power, and my significance in society at large’ in these two embroidered silk collages. Zangewa focuses on what she calls ‘daily feminism’; the things women do that are not typically acknowledged but keep society moving, including domestic labour like sewing. In these two works, she stitches her own story as a form of empowerment, showing herself in a state of rest to counter the capitalist drive for productivity, and within an urban landscape.
Midnight Aura and Angelina Rising reference the colonial history of trading Dutch or ‘Hollandaise’ wax print cotton textiles in West and Central Africa. The artist focused on two patterns made by the Dutch company Vlisco, known by the women’s names Angelina and Aura.*
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
Hand-stitched silk collage
Billie Zangewa
Zangewa states that she is ‘reclaiming my identity, my feminine power, and my significance in society at large’ in these two embroidered silk collages. Zangewa focuses on what she calls ‘daily feminism’; the things women do that are not typically acknowledged but keep society moving, including domestic labour like sewing. In these two works, she stitches her own story as a form of empowerment, showing herself in a state of rest to counter the capitalist drive for productivity, and within an urban landscape.
Midnight Aura and Angelina Rising reference the colonial history of trading Dutch or ‘Hollandaise’ wax print cotton textiles in West and Central Africa. The artist focused on two patterns made by the Dutch company Vlisco, known by the women’s names Angelina and Aura.*
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
Mercedes Azpilicueta
Cotton and wool jacquard textile
Azpilicueta frequently reclaims the form of the monumental tapestry — a medium traditionally used to convey ‘grand’ patriarchal narratives — to dismantle rigid (often colonial) histories. Here she pays tribute to a protofeminist retelling of the colonial myth of LucÃa Miranda, a white woman captured by the Indigenous population of what is now known as Argentina. Argentinian writer Eduarda Mansilla reframed the popular legend in her 1860 novel LucÃa Miranda, in which she instilled both the titular character and the Indigenous people with agency, building bonds and exchanging knowledge.
Mansilla herself rejected societal norms as a traveller, translator and educator.
Imagining a fictional dialogue between herself, LucÃa and Mansilla, Azpilicueta depicts a panoramic landscape populated by women who defy gendered stereotypes and seek ‘alternative ways of life’. The digitally created composition was woven on an industrial jacquard loom in the Netherlands. The surreal scene pays homage to Latin America’s literary tradition of magical realism, while details like the ‘vanishing’ women floating in the upper half of the tapestry tells of their systematic erasure from history.*
From the exhibition
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
(February – May 2024)
Textiles are vital to our lives. We are swaddled in them when we’re born, we wrap our bodies in them every day, and we’re shrouded in them when we die.
What does it mean to imagine a needle, a loom or a garment as a tool of resistance? How can textiles unpack, question, unspool, unravel and therefore reimagine the world around us?
Since the 1960s, textiles have become increasingly present in artistic practices for subversive ends. This is significant as the medium has been historically undervalued within the hierarchies of Western art history. Textiles have been considered ‘craft’ in opposition to definitions of ‘fine art’, gendered as feminine and marginalised by scholars and the art market. The 50 international artists in this show challenge these classifications, harnessing the medium to speak powerfully about intimate, everyday stories as well as wider socio-political narratives, teasing out these entangled concerns through a stitch, a knot, a braid, through the warp and the weft. These artists defy traditional expectations of textiles, embracing abstraction or figuration to push the boundaries of the medium. They draw on its material history to reveal ideas relating to gender, labour, value, ecology, ancestral knowledge, and histories of oppression, extraction and trade.
Rather than dictating a chronological history of fibre art, the exhibition is organised in thematic dialogues between artists — across both generations and geographies — to explore how artists have embraced textiles to critique or push up against regimes of power. Some artists work alone with solitary, near-meditative practices, while others reflect the shared approach that the medium often invites, working with collaborators in acts of community and solidarity. Spanning intimate hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations, these artworks communicate multi-layered stories about lived experience, invoking the vital issues embedded in fibre and thread.
[*Barbican Centre]
Taken at the Barbican Centre
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
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
Solange Pessoa
Thread, fabric, clay and cotton
Hammock was created in response to the land of Minas Gerais, Brazil, where Pessoa grew up. Textiles — in the form of rags and canvas — act as a carrier for living and decaying matter. Here fabric bags, stained with the orange soil that fills them, resemble voluminous, lumpen bodily forms that evoke internal and external organs, as well as life and death. They could be breasts, uteruses, entrails, testicles. In Brazil, cadavers are often transported in hammocks instead of stretchers.
Pessoa is interested in the intertwining of the body and the landscape, believing that the two are interconnected expressions of the natural world. Pessoa sees her work as alive, expressing the polarities, complexities and unknowability of existence: ‘they do not follow an agenda or goal, they are unpredictable and subject to transformation … They happen, they gain body and autonomy … They seek to express the perplexity of 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
Cotton and wool on cotton and ink on paper
Arpilleras are among the most potent and lasting depictions of resistance in Chile from the period of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973—1990). Literally meaning ‘burlap’, arpilleras were made in workshops by groups of women in economically deprived areas of Santiago from scraps of fabric (often used food sacks) that their makers had to hand.
These four arpilleras attend to the various personal and societal problems their makers faced while their country was in crisis — domestic and women’s rights, questions of labour and agriculture, scarcity of natural resources and poverty — as well as the community they found together in their underground circle of making.
Small in scale, arpilleras were rolled up and smuggled out of the country to inform those outside Chile about state violence and human rights violations under Pinochet’s regime. Though many of the arpilleristas did not consider themselves to be artists, the re-appraisal of women’s work and anonymous craft practices has led to a surge of interest in their work within fine art and museum contexts.*
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 Ibrahim Mahama
A new artwork by Ibrahim Mahama transformed our Lakeside Terrace, enveloping the building’s iconic concrete walls with approximately 2000 square metres of bespoke woven cloth.
Purple Hibiscus was created in collaboration with hundreds of craftspeople from Tamale in Ghana where the colossal panels of pink and purple fabric were woven and sewn by hand, to be fitted to the brutalist planes of our building.
100 ‘batakaris’ – robes worn by Ghanaian kings – were embroidered onto the artwork. Often saved by families over generations, these precious textiles carry the imprints of the figures they once clothed, signifying the continued relevance of intergenerational knowledge. Ibrahim Mahama holds a deep interest in the life cycles of textiles and what can be learnt from the historical memories embedded within them.*
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
by Mrinalini Mukherjee
Sri, 1982
Dyed hemp
Pakshi, 1985
Dyed hemp
Vanshri, 1994
Dyed Hemp
Embracing the expressive possibilities of natural fibres, Mukherjee developed a distinctive sculptural language by twisting and knotting ropes found in local markets in New Delhi. Her singular approach to fibre as an artform was radically different to her artistic peers in India. The complex system of knots that make up these three beings embody the artist’s vision of ‘sculpture as a kind of organic unfolding’. Two of the three Sanskrit titles of these works suggest gendered characters (Sri means ‘female deity’ and Vanshri can be translated as ‘goddess of the forest’, while Pakshi means ‘bird’). However, their rippling contours, folds and protrusions convey ambiguity and challenge the binaries of plant-animal, human-deity, male-female and figuration-abstraction. Mukherjee drew from myriad sources — Indian and European histories of sculpture, theatrical traditions and local crafts indigenous to India, as well as sacred and mythological iconographies. She insisted that her work was not ‘the iconic representation of any particular religious belief, rather it is the metamorphosed expression of varied sensory perceptions’.
Mukherjee used hoop-like structures to work from the base upwards; each figure emerged knot by knot, as if an elemental force born from the earth. It often took over a month to prepare the fibre — ropes had to be uncoiled and straightened, organised by colour and thickness, dyed and dried, before knotting could begin.*
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
Cotton and wool on cotton and ink on paper
Arpilleras are among the most potent and lasting depictions of resistance in Chile from the period of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973—1990). Literally meaning ‘burlap’, arpilleras were made in workshops by groups of women in economically deprived areas of Santiago from scraps of fabric (often used food sacks) that their makers had to hand.
These four arpilleras attend to the various personal and societal problems their makers faced while their country was in crisis — domestic and women’s rights, questions of labour and agriculture, scarcity of natural resources and poverty — as well as the community they found together in their underground circle of making.
Small in scale, arpilleras were rolled up and smuggled out of the country to inform those outside Chile about state violence and human rights violations under Pinochet’s regime. Though many of the arpilleristas did not consider themselves to be artists, the re-appraisal of women’s work and anonymous craft practices has led to a surge of interest in their work within fine art and museum contexts.*
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
Mercedes Azpilicueta
Cotton and wool jacquard textile
Azpilicueta frequently reclaims the form of the monumental tapestry — a medium traditionally used to convey ‘grand’ patriarchal narratives — to dismantle rigid (often colonial) histories. Here she pays tribute to a protofeminist retelling of the colonial myth of LucÃa Miranda, a white woman captured by the Indigenous population of what is now known as Argentina. Argentinian writer Eduarda Mansilla reframed the popular legend in her 1860 novel LucÃa Miranda, in which she instilled both the titular character and the Indigenous people with agency, building bonds and exchanging knowledge.
Mansilla herself rejected societal norms as a traveller, translator and educator.
Imagining a fictional dialogue between herself, LucÃa and Mansilla, Azpilicueta depicts a panoramic landscape populated by women who defy gendered stereotypes and seek ‘alternative ways of life’. The digitally created composition was woven on an industrial jacquard loom in the Netherlands. The surreal scene pays homage to Latin America’s literary tradition of magical realism, while details like the ‘vanishing’ women floating in the upper half of the tapestry tells of their systematic erasure from history.*
From the exhibition
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
(February – May 2024)
Textiles are vital to our lives. We are swaddled in them when we’re born, we wrap our bodies in them every day, and we’re shrouded in them when we die.
What does it mean to imagine a needle, a loom or a garment as a tool of resistance? How can textiles unpack, question, unspool, unravel and therefore reimagine the world around us?
Since the 1960s, textiles have become increasingly present in artistic practices for subversive ends. This is significant as the medium has been historically undervalued within the hierarchies of Western art history. Textiles have been considered ‘craft’ in opposition to definitions of ‘fine art’, gendered as feminine and marginalised by scholars and the art market. The 50 international artists in this show challenge these classifications, harnessing the medium to speak powerfully about intimate, everyday stories as well as wider socio-political narratives, teasing out these entangled concerns through a stitch, a knot, a braid, through the warp and the weft. These artists defy traditional expectations of textiles, embracing abstraction or figuration to push the boundaries of the medium. They draw on its material history to reveal ideas relating to gender, labour, value, ecology, ancestral knowledge, and histories of oppression, extraction and trade.
Rather than dictating a chronological history of fibre art, the exhibition is organised in thematic dialogues between artists — across both generations and geographies — to explore how artists have embraced textiles to critique or push up against regimes of power. Some artists work alone with solitary, near-meditative practices, while others reflect the shared approach that the medium often invites, working with collaborators in acts of community and solidarity. Spanning intimate hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations, these artworks communicate multi-layered stories about lived experience, invoking the vital issues embedded in fibre and thread.
[*Barbican Centre]
Taken at the Barbican Centre
by Mrinalini Mukherjee
Sri, 1982
Dyed hemp
Pakshi, 1985
Dyed hemp
Vanshri, 1994
Dyed Hemp
Embracing the expressive possibilities of natural fibres, Mukherjee developed a distinctive sculptural language by twisting and knotting ropes found in local markets in New Delhi. Her singular approach to fibre as an artform was radically different to her artistic peers in India. The complex system of knots that make up these three beings embody the artist’s vision of ‘sculpture as a kind of organic unfolding’. Two of the three Sanskrit titles of these works suggest gendered characters (Sri means ‘female deity’ and Vanshri can be translated as ‘goddess of the forest’, while Pakshi means ‘bird’). However, their rippling contours, folds and protrusions convey ambiguity and challenge the binaries of plant-animal, human-deity, male-female and figuration-abstraction. Mukherjee drew from myriad sources — Indian and European histories of sculpture, theatrical traditions and local crafts indigenous to India, as well as sacred and mythological iconographies. She insisted that her work was not ‘the iconic representation of any particular religious belief, rather it is the metamorphosed expression of varied sensory perceptions’.
Mukherjee used hoop-like structures to work from the base upwards; each figure emerged knot by knot, as if an elemental force born from the earth. It often took over a month to prepare the fibre — ropes had to be uncoiled and straightened, organised by colour and thickness, dyed and dried, before knotting could begin.*
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
by Mrinalini Mukherjee
Sri, 1982
Dyed hemp
Pakshi, 1985
Dyed hemp
Vanshri, 1994
Dyed Hemp
Embracing the expressive possibilities of natural fibres, Mukherjee developed a distinctive sculptural language by twisting and knotting ropes found in local markets in New Delhi. Her singular approach to fibre as an artform was radically different to her artistic peers in India. The complex system of knots that make up these three beings embody the artist’s vision of ‘sculpture as a kind of organic unfolding’. Two of the three Sanskrit titles of these works suggest gendered characters (Sri means ‘female deity’ and Vanshri can be translated as ‘goddess of the forest’, while Pakshi means ‘bird’). However, their rippling contours, folds and protrusions convey ambiguity and challenge the binaries of plant-animal, human-deity, male-female and figuration-abstraction. Mukherjee drew from myriad sources — Indian and European histories of sculpture, theatrical traditions and local crafts indigenous to India, as well as sacred and mythological iconographies. She insisted that her work was not ‘the iconic representation of any particular religious belief, rather it is the metamorphosed expression of varied sensory perceptions’.
Mukherjee used hoop-like structures to work from the base upwards; each figure emerged knot by knot, as if an elemental force born from the earth. It often took over a month to prepare the fibre — ropes had to be uncoiled and straightened, organised by colour and thickness, dyed and dried, before knotting could begin.*
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
by Ibrahim Mahama
A new artwork by Ibrahim Mahama transformed our Lakeside Terrace, enveloping the building’s iconic concrete walls with approximately 2000 square metres of bespoke woven cloth.
Purple Hibiscus was created in collaboration with hundreds of craftspeople from Tamale in Ghana where the colossal panels of pink and purple fabric were woven and sewn by hand, to be fitted to the brutalist planes of our building.
100 ‘batakaris’ – robes worn by Ghanaian kings – were embroidered onto the artwork. Often saved by families over generations, these precious textiles carry the imprints of the figures they once clothed, signifying the continued relevance of intergenerational knowledge. Ibrahim Mahama holds a deep interest in the life cycles of textiles and what can be learnt from the historical memories embedded within them.*
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
Maha Mohan
MFA Ceramics 2025
"Echoes of Longing" (Detail)
Porcelain, metal, wax
Echoes of Longing, Epilogue: the room, again
I return to the room I’ve never stood in,
but have always carried in the hollow between ribs.
The walls remember.
They do not speak in words,
but in breath, in the weight of air,
in the scent of jasmine and wet earth.
There is a mat where a body once lay —
giving birth, giving silence, giving up.
There is a corner where creatures sleep,
watchful with eyes of clay and salt.
A thread unspools across the floor,
trailing stories never spoken aloud.
The room is not built —
it is conjured.
Each object placed like an offering,
each fragment of ceramic a broken sentence
searching for its mother tongue — a belonging,
to be loved.
This is not a reconstruction.
This is a haunting.
A memory-play staged by grief,
with clay limbs, stitched cloth,
and the echo of a name I once called out
in the middle of a dream.
You may enter.
But leave your resolution at the door.
The room is still listening.
The room remembers you too.
by Mrinalini Mukherjee
Sri, 1982
Dyed hemp
Pakshi, 1985
Dyed hemp
Vanshri, 1994
Dyed Hemp
Embracing the expressive possibilities of natural fibres, Mukherjee developed a distinctive sculptural language by twisting and knotting ropes found in local markets in New Delhi. Her singular approach to fibre as an artform was radically different to her artistic peers in India. The complex system of knots that make up these three beings embody the artist’s vision of ‘sculpture as a kind of organic unfolding’. Two of the three Sanskrit titles of these works suggest gendered characters (Sri means ‘female deity’ and Vanshri can be translated as ‘goddess of the forest’, while Pakshi means ‘bird’). However, their rippling contours, folds and protrusions convey ambiguity and challenge the binaries of plant-animal, human-deity, male-female and figuration-abstraction. Mukherjee drew from myriad sources — Indian and European histories of sculpture, theatrical traditions and local crafts indigenous to India, as well as sacred and mythological iconographies. She insisted that her work was not ‘the iconic representation of any particular religious belief, rather it is the metamorphosed expression of varied sensory perceptions’.
Mukherjee used hoop-like structures to work from the base upwards; each figure emerged knot by knot, as if an elemental force born from the earth. It often took over a month to prepare the fibre — ropes had to be uncoiled and straightened, organised by colour and thickness, dyed and dried, before knotting could begin.*
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
Pa Pouvwa Gran Mèt la Mèt Jean Simon Britus Grann Brigitte Capitaine Jean Zombi Se Nonm Sa yo ki mèt et mètres 4 kwen ak mitan simitye (By the Power of the Almighty, Jean Simon Britus, Grann Brigitte and Captain Jean Zombi are Masters and Mistresses of the Four Corners and Centre of the Cemetery), 2014 –17
Myrlande Constant
Sequins and beads on cotton
Constant has transformed the practice of making drapo Vodou. In Haiti, these flags, depicting the spirits (or Iwa), were typically embellished with sequins; Constant incorporates beads, a finer material that allows her to capture light, movement and perspective with a complexity previously unseen in the artform.
In this drapo, Constant, whose father was a Vodou priest, sews a complex cemetery scene. At the centre of the composition, Bawon Samdi and Grann Brijit, the lwa of the dead, storm a cemetery on horseback while their hands hold whips hoisted into the air to strike figures in red and black. These are the malefektè (transgressors) who are attempting to capture zonbi — a body or spirit that is raised from the dead and forced to obey the reviver, usually carrying out manual labour or acts of criminality on their behalf.
In Vodou, the zonbi embody exploitative labour, and the ropes that bind them are a direct reference to enslavement. For some who follow this religion, the capturing and use of Zonbi has ambiguous moral implications. In this scene, Constant asserts that the dead should not be exploited.*
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
Solange Pessoa
Thread, fabric, clay and cotton
Hammock was created in response to the land of Minas Gerais, Brazil, where Pessoa grew up. Textiles — in the form of rags and canvas — act as a carrier for living and decaying matter. Here fabric bags, stained with the orange soil that fills them, resemble voluminous, lumpen bodily forms that evoke internal and external organs, as well as life and death. They could be breasts, uteruses, entrails, testicles. In Brazil, cadavers are often transported in hammocks instead of stretchers.
Pessoa is interested in the intertwining of the body and the landscape, believing that the two are interconnected expressions of the natural world. Pessoa sees her work as alive, expressing the polarities, complexities and unknowability of existence: ‘they do not follow an agenda or goal, they are unpredictable and subject to transformation … They happen, they gain body and autonomy … They seek to express the perplexity of 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
Hand-stitched silk collage
Billie Zangewa
Zangewa states that she is ‘reclaiming my identity, my feminine power, and my significance in society at large’ in these two embroidered silk collages. Zangewa focuses on what she calls ‘daily feminism’; the things women do that are not typically acknowledged but keep society moving, including domestic labour like sewing. In these two works, she stitches her own story as a form of empowerment, showing herself in a state of rest to counter the capitalist drive for productivity, and within an urban landscape.
Midnight Aura and Angelina Rising reference the colonial history of trading Dutch or ‘Hollandaise’ wax print cotton textiles in West and Central Africa. The artist focused on two patterns made by the Dutch company Vlisco, known by the women’s names Angelina and Aura.*
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
Solange Pessoa
Thread, fabric, clay and cotton
Hammock was created in response to the land of Minas Gerais, Brazil, where Pessoa grew up. Textiles — in the form of rags and canvas — act as a carrier for living and decaying matter. Here fabric bags, stained with the orange soil that fills them, resemble voluminous, lumpen bodily forms that evoke internal and external organs, as well as life and death. They could be breasts, uteruses, entrails, testicles. In Brazil, cadavers are often transported in hammocks instead of stretchers.
Pessoa is interested in the intertwining of the body and the landscape, believing that the two are interconnected expressions of the natural world. Pessoa sees her work as alive, expressing the polarities, complexities and unknowability of existence: ‘they do not follow an agenda or goal, they are unpredictable and subject to transformation … They happen, they gain body and autonomy … They seek to express the perplexity of 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
Mercedes Azpilicueta
Cotton and wool jacquard textile
Azpilicueta frequently reclaims the form of the monumental tapestry — a medium traditionally used to convey ‘grand’ patriarchal narratives — to dismantle rigid (often colonial) histories. Here she pays tribute to a protofeminist retelling of the colonial myth of LucÃa Miranda, a white woman captured by the Indigenous population of what is now known as Argentina. Argentinian writer Eduarda Mansilla reframed the popular legend in her 1860 novel LucÃa Miranda, in which she instilled both the titular character and the Indigenous people with agency, building bonds and exchanging knowledge.
Mansilla herself rejected societal norms as a traveller, translator and educator.
Imagining a fictional dialogue between herself, LucÃa and Mansilla, Azpilicueta depicts a panoramic landscape populated by women who defy gendered stereotypes and seek ‘alternative ways of life’. The digitally created composition was woven on an industrial jacquard loom in the Netherlands. The surreal scene pays homage to Latin America’s literary tradition of magical realism, while details like the ‘vanishing’ women floating in the upper half of the tapestry tells of their systematic erasure from history.*
From the exhibition
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
(February – May 2024)
Textiles are vital to our lives. We are swaddled in them when we’re born, we wrap our bodies in them every day, and we’re shrouded in them when we die.
What does it mean to imagine a needle, a loom or a garment as a tool of resistance? How can textiles unpack, question, unspool, unravel and therefore reimagine the world around us?
Since the 1960s, textiles have become increasingly present in artistic practices for subversive ends. This is significant as the medium has been historically undervalued within the hierarchies of Western art history. Textiles have been considered ‘craft’ in opposition to definitions of ‘fine art’, gendered as feminine and marginalised by scholars and the art market. The 50 international artists in this show challenge these classifications, harnessing the medium to speak powerfully about intimate, everyday stories as well as wider socio-political narratives, teasing out these entangled concerns through a stitch, a knot, a braid, through the warp and the weft. These artists defy traditional expectations of textiles, embracing abstraction or figuration to push the boundaries of the medium. They draw on its material history to reveal ideas relating to gender, labour, value, ecology, ancestral knowledge, and histories of oppression, extraction and trade.
Rather than dictating a chronological history of fibre art, the exhibition is organised in thematic dialogues between artists — across both generations and geographies — to explore how artists have embraced textiles to critique or push up against regimes of power. Some artists work alone with solitary, near-meditative practices, while others reflect the shared approach that the medium often invites, working with collaborators in acts of community and solidarity. Spanning intimate hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations, these artworks communicate multi-layered stories about lived experience, invoking the vital issues embedded in fibre and thread.
[*Barbican Centre]
Taken at the Barbican Centre
by Ibrahim Mahama
A new artwork by Ibrahim Mahama transformed our Lakeside Terrace, enveloping the building’s iconic concrete walls with approximately 2000 square metres of bespoke woven cloth.
Purple Hibiscus was created in collaboration with hundreds of craftspeople from Tamale in Ghana where the colossal panels of pink and purple fabric were woven and sewn by hand, to be fitted to the brutalist planes of our building.
100 ‘batakaris’ – robes worn by Ghanaian kings – were embroidered onto the artwork. Often saved by families over generations, these precious textiles carry the imprints of the figures they once clothed, signifying the continued relevance of intergenerational knowledge. Ibrahim Mahama holds a deep interest in the life cycles of textiles and what can be learnt from the historical memories embedded within them.*
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 Ibrahim Mahama
A new artwork by Ibrahim Mahama transformed our Lakeside Terrace, enveloping the building’s iconic concrete walls with approximately 2000 square metres of bespoke woven cloth.
Purple Hibiscus was created in collaboration with hundreds of craftspeople from Tamale in Ghana where the colossal panels of pink and purple fabric were woven and sewn by hand, to be fitted to the brutalist planes of our building.
100 ‘batakaris’ – robes worn by Ghanaian kings – were embroidered onto the artwork. Often saved by families over generations, these precious textiles carry the imprints of the figures they once clothed, signifying the continued relevance of intergenerational knowledge. Ibrahim Mahama holds a deep interest in the life cycles of textiles and what can be learnt from the historical memories embedded within them.*
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