The art world has gone soft and is all the better for it. The UK’s galleries have undergone something tantamount to yarn-bombing over the last couple of years. There have been politically taut weavings in the exhibition Unravel at the Barbican, a suspended woven forest by Magdalena Abakanowicz at Tate Modern, tufted landscapes by Sheila Hicks at Hepworth Wakefield and high-fibre storytelling in Threads at the Arnolfini. Textile and fibre, once maligned for associations with folk art, femininity and 1970s corporate lobbies, have threaded their way to the heart of the art world.
The Hayward Gallery touring show Material Worlds – recently opened at the Mead Gallery in Coventry – is curated by Caroline Achaintre, an artist known for her tufted fibre wall-hangings. This survey of recent textile-related work by artists based in the UK takes an expansive view, including a ceramic relief by Paloma Proudfoot for which she has sliced slabs of clay like a pattern cutter, and a vast machine by Holly Hendry that processes a turning loop of images rendered in textile-backed silicone.
This appealing and dynamic show favours substantial works and gives them plenty of space. A focal corner is occupied by Phyllida Barlow’s towering untitled: canvasracks. From a distance, it suggests a huddle of giant children playing at ghosts beneath colourful sheets. Close up, each sheet turns out to be a painted canvas, suspended from their corners on poles moored in concrete cylinders – they’re like uninscribed banners waiting for protest, or old signs with the text washed off. Barlow sneakily muddies the whole idea of textile art as a distinct genre. Behind most oil paintings is a similar sheet of fabric on a wooden stretcher.
There’s welcome wit and light-heartedness. A dramatic hanging in geometric black and white by Alexandre da Cunha trails on to the gallery floor. Look closely, and its fluttery fabric panels turn out to be nylon umbrella canopies lifted off their frames. A nearby photograph by Tonico Lemos Auad of a reclining fox documents a sculpture made of carpet fluff stabilised with hairspray. This is art made from the stuff of our everyday – da Cunha renders spectacular beauty from cheap and mass-produced objects, while Lemos Auad forms dreamy landscapes from waste materials.
Marc Camille Chaimowicz, too, makes the familiar strange, creating hybrid objects and extending the realm of fine art into the apparent banality of home decor. Against a panel of grandiose pink wallpaper, two identical seats stand, one performing as a chaise longue, the other as an upright chair. Thinking of the natural tendency to look for pictures in patterned wallpaper, the whole arrangement suggests a freakish psychoanalyst’s office, in which the roles of analyst and analysand can switch back and forth in a setting primed to provoke the most delirious revelations. Even the single coat hook screwed into the wall looks possessed.
Achaintre’s own work HEL (2023) is a great monstrous thing, like a multicoloured pelt strung to the wall. Gaping holes give it the appearance of a vast tormented insect mask without diminishing its fluffy appeal.
Hendrickje Schimmel (who works under the name Tenant of Culture) makes compellingly ugly sculptures out of ripped apart and restacked shoe parts. The shoes are “pre-consumer waste” – new but unsold inventory, potentially destined for destruction – arising from the garment industry’s toxic addiction to overproduction. Fashion has an amazing ability to repackage dissent as a commodity. These tall, clumpy, lashed-together sculptures were made in 2021-22 and look weirdly like the £1,000 clumpy, lashed-together Balenciaga sneakers worn at Frieze art fair last week.
Both Jonathan Baldock and Zadie Xa have created costumes suggesting a contemporary appropriation of folk rituals – his from Britain, hers from Korea. Xa’s hooded coat is embroidered with iridescent patches, pictures of kimchi, yin-yang symbols and skeins of artificial hair. Baldock’s paired processional sculptures The Caretakers are decorated with botanical emblems. A long veil covers the face (though a peephole has been stitched at genital level) and a second decorative head appears at an elevated position on a headpiece.
What bodies are present have been taken apart. Anna Perach’s Anatomical Venus (reviewed when it was shown at Gasworks) is a sculpture of a female body made in tufted Axminster with demountable glass and leather body parts. The long silicone strip running through the metal rollers of Hendry’s shiny machine carry images lifted from anatomical illustrations, as though human material has been thinned down to two dimensions. Most gruesome of all is Proudfoot’s The Mannequins Reply, in which glazed ceramic female figures stitch one another into garments over exposed muscle.
Textile’s great appeal is its familiarity – this is stuff we wear next to our skin. Material Worlds invites us to see it as an extension of the body, and to ponder what lies beneath.
