The Rhythm of the Handcrafted
Once relegated to ‘merely craft’, textiles are suddenly everywhere. Over the past 10 to 15 years, artists and hobbyists alike have been turning in great numbers to textile processes, bolstered by a spate of large international exhibitions of seminal 20th century fibre artists like Lenore Tawney, Anni Albers, Gunta Stolzl, Harmony Hammond, and Sheila Hicks. And, if social media is anything to go by, this gravitation towards the soft, the stitched and the handmade has only increased during recent periods of lockdown, where feelings of stress and anxiety have seen people turn to the slow, repetitive, comforting processes of knitting, embroidery and quilting to get them through.
Why are we so drawn to textiles? Is it because, when our fingers touch cloth, they’re sensing something deeper—an emotional resonance, a history held in fibre?
Not so long ago, textiles meant work—a lot of it. A simple woollen garment would require weeks of labour to make from scratch. Shear a sheep, wash a fleece, comb it lock by lock
