Date/Time
Date(s) - 10th Dec 2025
11:00-12:00
Location
The Wilson
Categories
Exhibition: Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles
A Curator-led tour for Friends around the Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles exhibition. This is a free event for Friends but places are limited and must be booked in advance. Please email events@friendsofthewilson.org.uk to reserve your place.
Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles explores how artists are using textiles in surprising and radical ways. Illuminating the diverse roles textiles play in contemporary artistic practice, the exhibition brings together artists who take the intimate, everyday and domestic quality of textiles and transform them into theatrical, bold, unsettling and humorous artworks that create worlds and tell stories ranging from the personal to the cosmic.
Material Worlds is an ambitious, free, group exhibition exploring how contemporary artists are using textiles in surprising and radical ways.
Illuminating the diverse roles textiles play in contemporary artistic practice, the exhibition brings together artists who take the intimate and domestic quality of textiles and transform them into theatrical, bold, unsettling and humorous artworks that inspire, challenge and offer new ways of thinking.
The artists in this exhibition share a deep awareness of the cultural significance of textiles, whilst exploring its potential as a medium. The familiar, material of everyday life is transformed into the unexpected – the ordinary made extraordinary – to explore ideas of the body, identity, gender, race, heritage, myth and folklore.
Artists featured in the exhibition include Caroline Achaintre, Jonathan Baldock, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Alexandre Da Cunha, Tonico Lemos Auad, Paul Maheke, Anna Perach, Yelena Popova, Yinka Shonibare, Rae-Yen Song, Tenant of Culture and Zadie Xa.
Material Worlds has been curated by Caroline Achaintre. A Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition from the Southbank Centre, London.
Image credit: Installation view, Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles, Mead Gallery. A Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition. Photography © Luke Pickering