Contemporary Use of Textiles

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For centuries textiles were classed as craft or decoration, however skilled. From the 1960s that boundary loosened. Magdalena Abakanowicz hung huge woven forms, her Abakans, freely in space, and Sheila Hicks built walls and columns of wrapped and knotted fibre. Feminist artists took up needlework on purpose: Faith Ringgold began painting and stitching her story quilts in 1980, and in her last decades Louise Bourgeois sewed sculptures from her own old clothes and linens.

Cloth often carries history. The quilters of Gee's Bend, Alabama, among them Loretta Pettway, made improvised, boldly geometric quilts from worn work clothes. Abdoulaye Konaté composes large hangings from dyed Malian cotton, while Yin Xiuzhen sews used garments into miniature cities packed inside suitcases. El Anatsui stitches bottle caps and aluminium strips into shimmering sheets that fold and drape like fabric. Look for the tension between softness and weight, and between domestic skill and monumental scale.