Inspiration
Unraveled Threads
How to knit a cloud from wire. How to build a monument from shaggy yarn. How to create the sea from cloth. First you dream it, and then you start gathering your materials. Perhaps your octopus grows from a shiny sleeping bag, your monument grows from rugs, and your cloud grows from wire and shells.
In the Barbican’s new exhibition Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, each artwork started with a puzzle that each artist interpreted through fiber and stitch. The variety is staggering, from artworks taller and wider than a house to ones that would fit in your hand and succumb to a breeze.
The curators write, “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 … How can textiles unpack, question, unspool, unravel and therefore reimagine the world around us?”
In order to show how artists from across the globe “teased out these entangled concerns through a stitch, a knot, a braid, through the warp and weft,” the curators created six themed areas and I’ve chosen pieces from each theme that captured my imagination.
Borderlands
IgshaAn Adams, Gebedswolke (Prayer Clouds), 2021-23
Igshaan Adams is a South African artist interested in how people create new intersections and pathways in post-Apartheid communities. People are literally covering new ground with their feet in spaces which were closed to them in the past. He represents this intermingling in knitted and knotted clouds of wire, shell, beads, and string.
T. Vinoja, Detail of The Day, 2021
T. Vinoja, a Sri Lankan artist, sees her embroidery stitches like the sutures of doctors on a battlefield. Her “aerial maps are informed by her own memories and the testimonies of others: stitches and salvaged textiles form borders, excavation routes, tents, checkpoints, bunkers, and burial sites.”
Subversive Stitch
Feliciano Centurión, Vestiditos (Little Dresses), 1994
Feliciano Centurión grew up in Paraguay and was discouraged from sewing and playing with what were considered girl’s things like dolls. Later, as an artist with AIDS, he intentionally created artworks with the household fabrics that he’d longed to sew with as a child.
Fabric of Everyday Life
Malgorzata Mirga-Tas, From the series Wjscie z Egiptu (Out of Egypt), 2021
Malgorzata Mirga-Tas is a Polish Roma artist who creates narrative patchwork depicting the everyday life of Roma people mending clothes, hanging out laundry, playing cards, and enjoying their community. Just look at her fancy chicken! Mirga-Tas aims to challenge stereotypes of Roma people by showing her family and friends as she sees them.
Sheila Hicks, Family Treasures, 1993
American artist Sheila Hicks says, “you can’t go anywhere in the world without touching fibre.” In Family Treasures, she wrapped 64 pieces of treasured clothing given to her by friends and family for the purpose of memorializing an everyday thing that we hold dear.
Bearing Witness
Arpilleras are the testimonies of Chilean women anonymously stitched into sackcloth. They tell the story of the cruel dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet from 1973-1990. This particular arpillera shows the women sewing their stories around a table.
Wound and Repair
Georgina Maxim, Dear Fesmeri and Mareni, The Dress Doesn’t Fit, 2022
Zimbabwean stitcher Georgina Maxim grew up thinking that her grandmother was her mother. By the time she discovered who her mother was, her mother had long been dead. But what she did have were some of her mother’s clothes which she stitched together in an act of remembrance.
Ancestral Threads
Sarah Zapata, To Teach or to Assume Authority, 2018-19
By far the largest of the themed areas, Ancestral Threads, took in everything from historical protest to remaking ceremonial dress and monuments.
Texas artist Sarah Zapata recreates a Nazca monument from shaggy yarn to embrace her Peruvian American heritage.
Tau Lewis, The Coral Reef Preservation Society, 2019
Canadian Tau Lewis confronts the African diaspora by creating a giant ocean from yard sale textiles. She honors those who lost their lives in the Middle Passage by memorializing them as eternal sea creatures.
Cecilia Vicuna, Quipu Austral, 2012
In her floor to ceiling work, Cecilia Vicuna revives the ancient Andean form of the quipu (meaning “knot” in the Quechua language), a system of “writing” with knots, which was banned by Spanish conquistadors.
Jeffrey Gibson recreates Choctaw-Cherokee non-gendered ceremonial dress from non-traditional materials in jumbo sizes to ask what “indigenous” means.
For each of these works to exist, each artist or group of artists had to decide that something needed to be said—perhaps something difficult, perhaps a memory, or perhaps a call to action—and that they would say it with a fiber manipulated with their own hands. Each of these artists had a thought that they couldn’t let go or wouldn’t let go of them, so they released that thought into their stitches. Thought made visible, stitch by stitch.
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art is at the Barbican in London until May 26. For folks who can’t visit the exhibition, there’s a comprehensive catalog with photos of each artwork and accompanying essays.
Come Shop With Us
So interesting! Thanks for sharing the exhibition.
This is fascinating and each work of art captures so much significance, and in unique ways – thank you for taking time to share this with us.
Exactly.
What poignant stories behind these vibrant textiles. Wish I could go. Not quite so so touching but still highly evocative was a highly detailed, shaded and nuanced portrait created entirely out of washing machine lint, and featured in an article in Threads magazine a few decades ago. Representing – and honoring -, I would think, what used to be called – probably still is – “women’s work”.
I thoroughly enjoyed this piece. Thank you.
If you are in NYC this weekend, check out this Fiber show at the South street seaport https://www.bravinlee.com/current-exhibition Love the contemporary art content!
AWESOME
Don’t “Family Treasures” almost look like balls of yarn? And memorializing those who died in the Middle Passage as sea creatures—what a lovely, powerful thought. Another UK exhibit we can only read about, but thanks (again) to Jeni Hankins we can at least do that.
Super big thanks to you for being such a dedicated reader of my articles!
Thank you, Jeni and MDK, for bringing this to us! Very powerful.
I’ll be in London next week and will visit this exhibit! Thank you SO much, Jeni!
Awesome!! So glad you can see it. There’s a big sculpture outside, too, but it’s easy to miss depending on which entrance you use. So, just ask the folks at the exhibit to direct you!
Looks like a fascinating show, thanks so much for sharing it with us
I just read on the Barbican’s website that the exhibition will move to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where it will be on view beginning in September. So there’s another chance for those who can’t get to London in the next two weeks.
Fantastic show, saw this a few weeks ago with my embroiderer/sculptor/painter best mate.
Thank you for mentioning that the exhibition is traveling to Amsterdam next!!
Wow! Thanks for sharing this exhibition with us. It’s incredibly moving and inspiring. So much creativity done with “humble” textiles, I just love it!
Now to learn more about quipu. Fascinated by the cultures and history represented here. Whether recipes, movie suggestions, travel destinations, and a little knitting too, you never know where the MDK gateway will lead to next.
Thanks for sharing this important work.
This is wonderful, thank you. Last year I went back to school to study history and textiles, and yesterday I hit “send” on my last paper of the year, which centered around fiber/textile art. This article landed like a gift.
Huge smiles to you and congratulations on finishing your last paper!
Thanks so much, everyone, for your kind comments! I’m glad you were able to go with me through this exhibition. As someone says in the comments, Unravel is traveling to Amsterdam next in case you are, too! I am constantly wowed by what we can make with fibers! Thank you for all of the encouragement that I find here on MDK.
This must be the time of textiles. In addition to this interesting exhibit, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York also have textile exhibits: Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction in DC, and Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art in NY. The Washington Post had an article about them last week.
Fascinating what can be done with fiber!
One of the current exhibits at the RISD Museum in Providence includes a room of textile works. There is a piece by Shelia Hicks.
Installation view of Art and Design from 1900 to Now on view 06-04-2022 through 08-04-2024.
A piece by Shelia Hicks, The Principal Wife, speaks to the intertwined roles of women and textiles.
Textile is a universal language. In all of the cultures of the world, textile is a crucial and essential component. Therefore, if you’re beginning with thread, you’re halfway home. There’s a level of familiarity that immediately breaks down any prejudice.
–Sheila Hicks, 2014
In The Principal Wife, Sheila Hicks created a malleable sculpture comprising multiple segments of undyed linen hanks bound at intervals with brightly colored yarn. Languidly draped over a Lucite bar and plunging heavily to the ground, these individual components are intended to be rearranged and adjusted. The work’s title refers to the varied roles of women that Hicks observed while traveling in North Africa, inspiring her to explore the ways in which many parts become one, and yet can split and recombine into new—and still whole—units.
–Kate Irvin, curator of costume and textiles
Oh my. These pieces are amazing. Such variety! Beyond impressive.
Fascinating. Thank you! I am going tomorrow to see an exhibit here in Oregon that would fit this theme of things needing to be said being expressed through textile art. If it’s ok to share a URL here you can read more at https://www.quiltsforempowerment.org/obstetric-fistula-art-exhibit