I have recently been to see the exhibition ‘Unravel. The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art’ at the Barbican Centre in London, UK. Here is the link to the relevant page of the Barbican website.

It runs until the 26th May 2024, so people living close can still catch it if they like. The theme is clearly about political art, or art that tackles difficult themes.

I have to say that it got mixed feelings from me, I liked some of the pieces and some not as much, but anyway I feel that it is good to see textiles under the spotlight again, and hopefully this will help with recognition of textile artists everywhere. It was crowded, so there seems to be a lot of interest from the art cliques.

The exhibition was boasting pieces from 50 different international artists, the great majority of them well established and renowned, some of them already passed away. I actually went to the exhibition hoping to see mainly contemporary scene artists, and I understood later that I had seen pieces from some of the people who brought textiles into the Fine Arts spectrum in the Fifties and Sixties!

Most of the artists were also eclectic artist that had started as, variously, traditional painters or ceramists or sculptors.

Some of the pieces were a bit more conceptual than I would have liked, resulting in not particularly interesting techniques but a lot of effort in reading the accompanying texts, and it got a bit too much by the end of the afternoon.

An example of big names’ artworks were Leonore Tawney’s hanging woven sculptures, that broke with the idea of tapestries as the only possible woven outcome: she was a pioneer of the fibre art movement in the United States in the Fifties. Her long life (she lived to 100!) was dedicated to art and her parabola followed somewhat that of the fibre art movement , with a period of recognition in the Fifties followed by fewer exhibitions and recognition after the Seventies. After her earlier experiments with the loom in the Fifites, she gradually abandoned the loom for freer hanging shapes, and finally a nascent type of installation art, driven by a sense of spirituality that was in her 1950s works as well.

Another renowned American fibre artist whose piece I saw at the exhibition is Sheila Hicks, who was present with one of her installations of her ‘bundles’: groups of objects made of colourful yarn and fibres tightly wrapped to resemble sticks and pebbles. She is one of the innovators of the Sixties and Seventies fibre movement, and went on creating different installation art and sculpture pieces. The idea of traditional practices and indigenous rituals plays a part in her installations.

I felt that the representation of artists was a bit scarce on the European and Australian side, whereas the other continents seemed well represented.

There was a British contribution with a quilt piece by Tracey Emin, completely leaning towards the spoken word. It got a lot of interest from the artsy crowd. She upcycled different fabrics to create it, among those a Union Jack and felt scraps from old blankets, and hand appliqued and hand stitched them to shape provocative sentences.

A contribution from Poland was a beautiful quilt by Malgorzata Mirga-Tas depicting life as a Roma, and made by repurposing everyday fabrics. The scene of life in a Roma settlement is very lively and immediately relatable.

I was particularly pleased to see some relatively new face from Africa, such as Billie Zangewa from Malawi and later South Africa, that I did not know and now I looked up on internet and in my reference book on textile artists.

She calls her pieces ‘hand-embroidered silk collage’ and I would say that that name suits them best than the name that I have seen given them, ‘silk tapestries’ . She uses scraps of silk fabrics with strong visual impact.

There was a room all about artworks by South African Igshaan Adams: some works hanging in the middle of the room, almost inviting the viewer to go into their clouds (totally forbidden! all the toddlers were tempted, but the museum attendants were very strict), some from the walls, and a big painting-like piece occupying the whole of one wall by itself. All encrusted with beads and shells and small semi-precious stones, with twisted fabric scraps.

Instead, Tau Lewis is a Canadian artist who talks about her roots as descendant of the African diaspora: she often represents lost Middle Passage victims as fantastical sea creatures in her huge wall hangings.

There was a good representation of Asian artists, such as Cian Dayrit from Philippines with two big embroidered maps in the section about Borderlands, showing places where colonialism is still a very current issue.

Zamthingla Ruivah’s woven piece is actually not one to be shown in a museum as wall hanging but a piece that is meant to be worn everyday as a symbol of protest for the injustice and violence suffered by a young girl in India: thousands of people in the young girl’s local area now weave and wear cloth in that pattern that has become a silent rallying cry for justice. A kind of everyday power of art when it comes in contact with textiles.

Another big name of the fibre art scene was Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee, who was present with three pieces of her knotted sculptures resembling human figures. I quite liked her pieces, as I am quite fond of macrame artists, and her pieces seemed to me viscerally meaningful, like ancient goddess’ statues talking to me from the past.

There were no felt pieces at all, a bit disappointing that, as I know quite a few felters that could have been spot on for the theme.

There was a big installation piece that was made with unspoon wool, described in the exhibition leaflet as ‘the product of making yarn but stopping after the carding process.’ It seemed like barely prefelted wool to me, but a bit more consistent than carded wool. There was sound as well, but it was hard to appreciate it in the crowded room where also one other installation piece with sound had the same issue. The artist, South American Cecilia Vicuna, makes pieces that are grounded in Chilean traditions.

At the end of the exhibition there were some scraps of things that were made using materials and techniques seen in the art pieces, so we could touch and feel the materials: it was a very nice, family friendly touch (pun intended).

I hope to have given you a taste of what was on show.

After the exhibition, I also got a book on textile artists and politics, although not the exhibition book: ‘Women’s Work. From feminine arts to feminist art.’ by Ferren Gipson. It’s a collection of biographies of a couple of pages each, with some photos of artworks for each artist: I think that it can be a good reference book to know who is who in the old guard of textile art, though there are some more contemporary faces. It’s a bit scarce on the techniques side, but anyway pretty interesting from a historical point of view.