Once seen as a creative backwater thanks to its association with craft and domestic labour, textile or fibre art has emerged as the medium of our moment. The octogenarian Sheila Hicks’s vast, amorphous, rainbow-hued experiments with fibre filled Paris’s Pompidou Centre in 2018, while the late Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz’s huge, witchy, labial rope sculptures haunted London’s Tate Modern in 2022.
Now these leading lights can be found within Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. A survey exploring the movement’s inter-generational cross-currents, it encompasses everything from hand-embroidered hankies to big sculptural installations. “Textiles as a term is so capacious and expansive,” says Lotte Johnson, one of Unravel’s three curators. “We’re looking at how cultural dialogues as well as poetic and personal associations speak across geographies and time.”
