Art these days can be anything. Of course, painting and sculpture are the traditional mediums that will always have their place, but there are many artists who are incorporating fibers and threads into their work. Once thought of as craft for women who sit at home all day, textiles are fast becoming a big part of the art world, and here we break down ten contemporary textile artists you should know.
Bea Bonafini @beabonafini
Multidisciplinary artist Bea Bonafini is probably best known for her work with textiles. Her work is socially engaged, inspired by confrontation in human relationships, ritual processes and notions of the sensual and visceral, often replacing paint with fabric.
Carolina Mazzolari @carolina_mazzolari_studio
Carolina Mazzolari’s seemingly abstract works are inspired by psychoanalysis, intuition, cognition, human behaviour and emotional development (not for the faint-hearted). Often addressing deep human emotions such as loss, grief, love and struggle, her works attempt to make memory and the unconscious both physical and tangible.
Alexandra Kehayoglou @alexandrakehayoglou
Turning rugs into art, Alexandra Kehayoglou’s work uses discarded thread from her family’s carpet factory in Buenos Aires. Her works are portals to memories of her Greek grandparents’ carpet-weaving heritage in Ottoman Turkey. Born in Argentina, her works reference her local landscape, appearing like three-dimensional maps of her home.
Faith Ringgold
Artist and activist Faith Ringgold has had a stellar career, with her works appearing on everything from canvas, books and quilts. Her textile works were first made in a bid to get away from the association of painting with Western traditions. She was first inspired to incorporate fabric into her work by 14th and 15th century Nepali paintings that were framed with cloth brocades, prompting her to begin working on her quilt paintings. Her mother, Willi Posey, was a clothing designer, and the pair often collaborated on the quilts she made in the African-American tradition.
Nour Jaouda @nour.jaouda
Based in Cairo but born in Libya, Nour Jaouda mixes paint and textile design, transforming it into installation art. Her work explores cultural mobility and the aesthetics of displacement in an Egyptian cultural context. Her pieces echo traditional Libyan craftsmanship and imported western systems, while simultaneously depicting personal and collective scenery. Her textured compositions are an attempt to create a narrative around the migratory experience, which examine the space between here and there, the familiar and strange, and the self and the other.
Sheila Hicks
Sheila Hicks first became interested in working with fibers while in South America. Having had a global art career, her work includes weaving and embroidering with a number of materials that include shoelaces, rubber bands and socks. Her work has been the subject of countless exhibitions, biennials and retrospectives.
Anna Perach @anna_perach
Anna Perach’s performative work is influenced by personal and cultural myths. Her work is inspired by female mythic characters, retelling their stories in a 21st century context. Using a technique called tufting, Anna transforms carpet textiles into wearable sculptures with her works functioning as both a garment and an independent sculpture, which often become part of performances.
Charlotte Colbert @colbertcharlotte
Textiles don’t just mean sewing, it can also mean covering your sculptures in fur, which is exactly what Charlotte Colbert has been doing in her recent works. Her flocked ceramics play with the inversion and subversion of the inside and the outside, with her furry sculptures re-imaging viral cells, breasts and stomachs under a soft pink light.
Camilla Hanney @camilla.hanney
Irish artist Camilla Hanney has won multiple prizes for her multidisciplinary work. Through her practice she attempts to provide a voice for fragments of the past that have become embedded and lost in history. By fabricating the familiar in an unfamiliar context – like brooms made out of hair – she asks her audience to rethink their relationships towards everyday objects.
Hoa Dung Clerget @hdclerget
Having studied at not one but two prestigious London art schools – Central Saint Martins and Royal College of Art – Hoa Dung Clerget mixes painting and thread to explore the frontiers between art and design. Her embroidered works are simple yet spell-binding, and we can’t wait to see where she goes once she graduates.
Text Lizzy Vartanian
