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.
