The creative potential of textiles in art

Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
13 February – 26 May 2024
Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK

An exhibition of this nature was long overdue. Textiles are a significant part of everyday life, yet they remain one of the most underexamined mediums in art history and contemporary practice. Co-curated by the Barbican Gallery in London and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, this art show features artists from the 1960s to today who have explored the transformative and subversive potential of textiles.

I first became intrigued by hand-weaving and the importance of textiles as an art medium when I saw the Anni Albers exhibition at Tate Modern in 2019. My interest in textiles grew when I attended Magdalena Abakanowicz‘s exhibition last year, also at the Tate. The Polish sculptor and fibre artist, whose pieces are included in this exhibition at the Barbican, demonstrated the power of this medium. She pioneered fibre-based sculpture and installation in the 1960s.

However, Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art is the first major exhibition I’ve seen that brings together over 100 artworks by 50 international practitioners. From intimate handcrafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations, the show focuses on the tactile processes of stitching, weaving, braiding, beading, and knotting. These artists have embraced fibre and thread to tell stories that challenge power structures, transgress boundaries, and reimagine the world around them.

Organized thematically, with artists placed in intergenerational and transcultural dialogues, the lower galleries of the exhibition feature artists who draw inspiration from their ancestors. Indigenous peoples have used thread for centuries to communicate, share information, tell stories, and express themselves. Textiles reveal histories of creativity but also speak to systems of marginalization and violence that have sought to suppress Indigenous knowledge. Unravelling the history of a textile unveils stories of globalism and trade, such as a single thread of cotton dyed with indigo, which evokes histories of empire, the transatlantic trade, and the labor of enslaved people.

Yee I-Lann (Malaysia, 1971) is interested in how textiles in the form of woven mats resist legacies of colonialism. In pre-colonial Southeast Asia, people met on woven mats called ‘tikar.’ Western settlers introduced tables when Borneo was colonized by the Portuguese, British, and Dutch. In these artworks, tables symbolize the imposition of a patriarchal and colonial worldview, while the mat signifies a more democratic and mutual power, imbued with ancestral knowledge and tradition.

On the ground floor, Cecilia Vicuña’s spatial installation Quipu Austral draws on the history of textiles as ancient systems of communication. In Andean cultures, textiles were used as a system of writing. Vicuña links the oppression of pre-colonial cultures to the devastation of the earth’s natural resources.

Next, Sarah Zapata’s ‘To Teach or to Assume Authority’ (2018-19) embraces her identity as a Peruvian American, two cultures in which textiles are integral. Her work references the architecture of the Nazca ceremonial site Cahuachi, where a huge woven cloth was excavated in 1952. She transforms the ruin into a landscape of vibrant latch-hooked threads, subverting the notion of the rug as floor-based. Indigenous communities in Peru only began using textiles on the floor after the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century.

In the next room, painted entirely in yellow, Acaye Kerunen creates abstract compositions with woven natural fibres to tell stories of joy, love, and ecstasy, originating in overcoming pain and trauma. This was made collaboratively with women using techniques they learned from fellow women community leaders in Uganda.

Another fascinating work was Solange Pessoa’s ‘Hammock’ (part of 4 hammocks), 1999-2003. Created in response to the land of Minas Gerais in Brazil where the artist grew up, textiles here serve as carriers for living and decaying matter. The fabric bags resemble internal and external organs, representing the intertwining of the body and the landscape. This artwork is part of the ‘Entangled Earth’ section of the exhibition, which rejects the idea that humanity is separated from or opposed to nature.

Two ‘Abakans’ by Magdalena Abakanowicz

As we progressed to the upper galleries, we encountered the ‘Subversive Stitch’ section, one of my favourite parts. This section focuses on how, across many cultures, textile-based art has been marginalized and deemed inferior as a domestic or ‘craft’ practice within a hierarchy of artistic value, framed as feminine through a sexist lens. Many artists have resisted this limiting approach and used stitching as a radical practice. This group includes artists such as Mounira Al Solh, Tracey Emin, Ghada Amer and Judy Chicago amongst others.

Judy Chicago’s ‘Birth Project’ (1980-85), for instance, was created to fill an iconographic void of images of birth in Western art. By collaborating with 150 women who volunteered to translate her designs into textiles using embroidery, quilting, macrame, needlepoint, and crochet, she depicted the diverse experience of giving birth: ‘the mythical, the celebratory, and the painful.’ The work on display unifies the visceral aspects of birth with a cosmic dimension.

In Pink Landscape (2007) by Ghada Amer, you see a naked woman in cream color in the background, partially obscured by horizontal and vertical lines of loose threads that reference Abstract Expressionism painting. Amer presents women as sexually liberated to counter representations of women as submissive. Her motivation to use this medium stems from her rejection as a young student in the 1980s, when she wasn’t allowed to enroll in a painting class at art school because she was a woman.

In Bandage Grip #9 (2020) by Harmony Hammond, red-stained pieces of cloth hang on the canvas surface, referencing violent actions outside the picture frame. Frayed canvas and burlap hang like reparative bandages. Hammond believes in the power of materials to carry messages, frequently alluding to trauma and recovery.

Igshaan Adams’ installation explores ‘desired lines’ in post-Apartheid South Africa, informal pathways created over time through footfall, often used as shortcuts. He sees these lines as symbolic of a collective act of resistance by a community historically segregated and marginalized through spatial planning. These pathways remain symbols of carving out one’s own path, collectively or individually. Belonging to the ‘Borderlines’ section of the exhibition, artists in this section question borders and attempt to transcend them to find a new way of being.

Finally, the ‘Bearing Witness’ section gathers artists from different backgrounds who use textiles to commemorate victims of oppression and speak back to power. The act of weaving, as a contemplative and slow medium, creates space for collectivity, memory, and grief.

As a whole, I was very interested to see all these artists together in the same exhibition, giving textiles the role they deserve in art history. We realized the relevance of this medium, from its use by our ancestors as a means of communication to unraveling the history of textiles to reveal stories of globalism and trade. What’s more, after being marginalized and relegated as an ‘inferior’ and domestic art form, framed as feminine through a sexist lens, advocates have used the art of weaving and stitching as a radical practice, which increases the creative potential of this medium. I really enjoyed attending this exhibition and strongly recommend it to anyone who has the opportunity to see it in Amsterdam in September this year.