Barbican Art Gallery
Tuesday 13 February – Sunday 26th May 2024
If you are in London before the 26th May 2024 why not pay a visit to this seminal exhibition of Textile Art at the Barbican Art Gallery? A few Phoenix members visited the exhibition last month and Maria Walker has written a blog about her visit and she definitely recommends you go and visit it yourself if you can.
“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.”
The above quotation has always resonated with me from the very moment I first came across it and has deeply influenced my own art practice, so I was delighted to see it written on the wall of the Gallery.
This mammoth exhibition of the art form of textiles sheds light on artists from the 1960s to today who have explored the transformative and subversive potential of textiles and exploit the medium to ask uncomfortable questions about power and who holds it.
There are over 100 artworks on display by 50 international artists, ranging from handmade intimate pieces to large-scale sculptural installations.
As textile artists we already know that as an art form textile art has consistently been underestimated and dismissed as craft or women’s work, but this exhibition proves that the association of textile art with the ‘fluffy’ and the domestic is instead its superpower! Conversely this seeming negative association makes it the ideal medium to use for political protest and exploring emotive and ‘uncomfortable’ narratives.
The exhibition features more than 100 artworks, from small embroideries to vast installations, by 50 international artists including the likes of Sheila Hicks, Louise Bourgeois, Cecilia Vicuña, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Tracey Emin to name but a few. These artists have all been drawn to the tactile processes of sewing,, weaving, beading etc and have used cloth and thread to tell stories that challenge power structures, transcend boundaries, explore difficult personal issues and to reimagine the world.
Instead of being arranged chronologically the exhibition is divided into separate themes which I found made it easier to relate to the artwork.
Subversive Stitch
Wound and Repair
Fabric of Everyday Life
Ancestral Threads
Borderlands
Bearing Witness.
Some of the work in the exhibition was visceral and some was upsetting but the message that came through loud and strong was just how powerful cloth is a medium of protest!
