Fibre Art, the world's most underexamined medium
Do you know how to sew on a button? If not, learn. It's a life skill.
It’s all about cloth in London at the moment. When Forms Come Alive, a huge sculptural group show at the Hayward on the South Bank greets the curious visitor with white silk parachutes opening and closing, like arial jellyfish, while on the other side of the Thames, the John Singer Sargent retrospective at Tate Britain allies his grand paintings with the clothes worn by his sitters. Meanwhile over at the Barbican, the capital’s most radical and political exhibition can be seen in Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, which is on until May 26. I know, a show about textiles might seem a bit crafty and soft. This exhibition is anything but.
Work by Cecilia Vicuna, Quipu Astral, at the Barbican
It’s a startling experience. The show brings together artists from the last fifty years who have explored the subversive nature of textiles and sewing to tell difficult and different stories about social injustice and struggle, from Cecilia Vicuna’s installation Quipu Astral which recalls the knotted technique of her ancestors, to Faith Ringgold’s quilted narrative of her family life in 1930’s Harlem, to South African artist Igshaan Adams’ clouds of wire and woven pieces indicating “desire lines”, informal pathways created over time through footfall across his home in Cape Town.
Igshaan Adams’ clouds of woven wire
And of course there is Tracey Emin, with her applique blanket No Chance (What a Year), accounting for the trauma she experienced after she was raped as a teenager.
The exhibition includes Loretta Pettway’s quilts, made by Pettway as part of the Gee’s Bend Quilting Collective in Alabama, which continues a tradition of quilting that emerged over 200 years ago in the enslaved community at the Pettway Plantation owned by Joseph Gee, and Sanford Biggers, whose work draws upon the history of quilts being used as codes in order to signpost routes for enslaved freedom seekers using the Underground Railroad. Pettway, incidentally, first showed disdain for quilting, but was encouraged to learn how to do it by her grandmother who insisted on her developing the skill. Her quilts are now in collections across America including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
From this, the exhibition takes you to the “arpilleras”, resistance quilts made by women from scraps of burlap fabric (often food sacks), in Chile depicting the agony of the Pinochet regime. They were rolled up and smuggled out of the country to inform the world about the violence and atrocities under Pinochet. Tapestries by Teresa Margolles commemorate the lives of Eric Garner and Jadeth Lopez, both of whom were murdered in appalling circumstances. It seems the humble needle can, and has been drafted in to express subversion, revolution and protest across the world.
Sewing is of course much more than the sort of derisory, gendered, meek art class at school which girls are typically offered to take instead of (say) pottery. There is a reason why the world’s earliest needle, discovered in a Siberian cave and around 50,000 years old is rightly enshrined. As anyone who suddenly realises their shirt or suit jacket is missing a button is aware, a needle is a still-critical implement and knowing how to sew, a life skill.
Without a needle to carry thread, you cannot make, mend or fashion clothes, or make things which enclose your body effectively and warmly. Without a needle, you have to resort to winding cloth around your body, toga-style. Or as the early Scots did, as a kilt. You can’t walk, or run, or ride a horse properly. Without a needle, you cannot make a coat or a pair of trousers, or suture a wound. Before the Middle Ages, most people got around their more or less needle-less era with ingenious clothing solutions such as belts or sashes. This was before the era of Edward III (1312-1377), a remarkable monarch who, incidentally, introduced innovations such as the clock and hot running water in a bathtub (his own), and who was the first Plantagenet king to insist on using English, (rather than Norman French), at court. He was married to an equally remarkable woman, Philippa of Hainault.
Philippa of Hainault’s effigy in Westminster Abbey
It was Philippa who brought a focus on stitched, close fitted clothes to the English world. Her orders for cloth and lists of clothes still remain, showing Philippa as a modern woman who insisted on new, vivid garments and who used clothes to indicate the in-touch nature of the court and the glorious brand of her husband’s rule. She abandoned the old notion of swathes of wool and replaced the notion of dressing at court it with tight, elegant clothes which aided movement and gave agency to those who wore them. She even established a cloth manufacturing colony in Norwich. “Blessed by the memory of Edward III and Philippa of Hainsault, his queen, who first invented clothes,” wrote a contemporary chronicler, possibly sarcastically. So connected with the textile industry was Philippa that five hundred years, later Queen Victoria actually dressed as her for a Buckingham Palace fancy dress ball in 1842, in order to help the Spitalfields silk industry.
Meanwhile, in 2024, more than one critic has suggested that “fibre art” is the thing right now; or, as The Guardian put it, textiles are “the medium of our moment.” For anyone who is connected to the world of contemporary art, this is a fascinating thought, and one which is reflected in the exhibition calendar. Last year one could hardly escape art via cloth, from the V&A’s stunning show on Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel, with its floor to ceiling display of boucle suits and little black dresses, to the giant Grayson Perry retrospective in Edinburgh, with rooms devoted to Perry’s vast, sociologically-focused tapestries, themselves referring to the Bayeux Tapestry, itself perhaps the first historical art work to which many people will have ever been exposed.
As Sheila Hicks, whose exhibit is of bundles of clothing wrapped in brightly coloured thread, comments “You can’t go anywhere in the world without touching fibre.”