Remembrance

Textiles are a visual and tactile medium. We connect with textiles because we know them and we understand them. To see them is to feel them, is to know them. This knowing and caring through textiles is collective. It’s a way into a shared social phenomenon, which is revived and reclaimed again and again by artists and communities when new stories urgently need to be pinned down, with textiles used in ever more inventive ways to accomplish this. Textiles are also a means of survival – of staying in the world, of capturing under-described lives and disappearing traditions and techniques. Textiles are a means of time travel and truth-telling and learning survival skills for the future. Fabric is social. Textiles are subversive, precisely because they are shared.

What makes textiles enduringly radical is their ability to embody connection. When people feel untethered from each other, their bodies and reality – as a result of pandemics, culture wars and lawless technology – textiles offer threads, ropes and lifelines to reconnect us. From the simple act of running a needle and thread through cloth to repair or make a garment, to a bobbin passing through a loom, the act of stitching or weaving an image or idea in place tethers us back to the world, again.

Words by Leigh Robb