TAPESTRY SHOW

Curated by Andia Newton

Our Tapestry Show aims to broadly consider the intricacies of what makes a contemporary tapestry. Historically, the definition of a ‘tapestry’ has been strict in regards to technique, but as our technologies evolve and fabric becomes more abundant and easily mass produced, has our opinion of what constitutes a tapestry changed?

The artists in this group show have been selected to explore the idea of tapestry from their own unique perspectives. Between Matt Payne’s storytelling drawings, Karolina Dworska’s dystopian characters, Kia Matanky-Becker’s poetry, and Janaki Mistry’s expression of identity through weaving, the group covers an expansive definition of what it means to weave a tapestry today.

​

​

Exhibiting artists:

 

Natasha Eves @natashaeves

Natasha Eves is a textile artist, educator and publican. I tawt I taw a puddy tat pairs iPhone screenshots of an iconic cartoon duo, animated through use of the triple zoom format. One, a tattoo on a porn actor’s leg, the other, spotted on an instagram account linked to a popular dating app.

 

Vittoria Camila Vilela Cogorno @vittoriocamila

Vittoria Camila Vilela Cogorno is a Peruvian-British multidisciplinary artist living and working in London. Their practice is an ongoing exploration of revealing and re-writing colonial ideas around gender, desire, fear and objectification. Working across performance, sound, drawing and textiles, their practice is formed of archival fragments, allowing them to imagine a reality that centres the essence of magic and queerness in the everyday.

 

Oscar Crabb @oscar.crabb

Oscar Crabb is an artist based in London, working primarily with antique linen and wool, and dyeing with 100% natural dyes. His practice aims to push historic dye and textile methods into the contemporary art canon. By straddling the discourse between eco-aesthetics and climate science, his pieces celebrate nature upon first glance, however with deeper reading provide a portal into the back catalogue of critical academic research into the looming climate crisis.

 

Theo Dunne @chablugoo

Theo Dunne (they / them) is a 25 year old amorphous blob and recent graduate of Fine Art BA at Central Saint Martins. They work across multiple forms so as to best reflect their own untethered-ness, from movement and performance, to painting and video work, to the most recent lockdown therapies: pyrography and loom weaving. Grief, identity, trauma, and the complicated joys of queerness are frequent themes Theo explores to best understand them, and they hope that even if it makes no sense, you at least have a good time.

 

Karolina Dworska @karolinkadworska

Karolina Dworska (b. 1997, Rzeszów, Poland) is a London based contemporary artist, and one of the artists selected for the 2021 Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Her work delves into the subject matter of the in-between; the grey area between dream and reality, and fantasy spaces, balancing precariously between definitions. Her multidisciplinary practice focuses on dreamscapes, in which things are not quite right, undefined and uncomfortable, explored through a variety of sculptural and textile mediums. She examines the fragility and strangeness of inhabiting a human body throughout her textile work.

​

Hamish Halley @hamish_halley

Hamish works across disciplines including textiles, printmaking and video, engaging with contemporary rural experience, folk history, craft and our relationships with animals and places. He often works with materials he has foraged, including plant matter for natural dye making. Hamish is currently based in Perthshire, Scotland.

 

Charlie Hawksfield @charliehawksfield

Charlie Hawksfield is a self taught artist living in London. He studied at Goldsmiths, but took an MA in Culture Industry rather than Fine Art. Over the last few years he has developed a personalised mono printing technique, using this he made a series of banner-like hangings on unstretched canvas. He is interested in medieval art and Indian miniatures. He also runs an artist led space and collective called Wells Projects.

 

Amelia Kelly @warning.thief

Amelia Kelly's work centres on the British class system and the visibility of class today responding to architectural monuments and symbols and status. Here before you stands Alec Peever's statue "Unity". It sits beside Rochdale's museum Touchstones and beyond it lies the Seven Sisters. Rochdale is historically held in the industrial weaving boom; in 2019 Rochdale is among the 10% most deprived areas in the country.

 

Kia Matanky-Becker @kiaannalauran

Kia Matanky-Becker is a writer, sculpture and performance artist whose work weaves together fantasy, humor and sexuality to explore childhood identity and the coming of age experience. Her work investigates the line between story-telling, story-sharing and story-inflicting. Kia stitches together fragmented narratives in an attempt to play with the idea of a linear timeline and allows for memory to be a place of creation as well as reflection. Influenced by magical realism she creates immersive environments that subvert the rules of the everyday and allow for open exchange, conversation and play.

 

Janaki Mistry @m_i_stry

Janaki’s practice is an ongoing exploration of how personal identities play out in wider culture and the sensitivities of talking about race, identity, and colonial histories. She uses the experience of living in white-dominated spaces and questioning western ideals by navigating and contesting what it means to be British.

 

Andia Coral Newton @andiacoralandiacoral

Andia is a London based maker and organiser. She is interested in the point when ‘Human history’ split off from ‘Natural history’, and envisions futures in which these concepts are knitted back together. Shelter seeking/creating/adorning are focal points in her practice.

​

Matt Payne @matty.p_123

Matt is a London based artist and musician. They use songwriting and drawing as a way of expressing narratives surrounding themes of vulnerability, feelings, gender and self reflection. They hope for their work to be something people find relatable and sincere.

 

Lola Pedersen @l0lar0se

Lola Pedersen is a London based artist interrogating how the mapping of scientific knowledge relates to the embodied experience of observing matter. By creating forms that exist both in a state of dissection and transience – Pedersen’s work encourages a deeper sense of ecological thought by questioning the division of living and non-living material. The pixelated quality of cross stitch is utilised as evidence of observed natural phenomena trapped in a state of digitisation, incompletely and imperfectly archived.

 

Johanna de Verdier @_deverdier

Johanna is a Swedish artist and coder based in London. Her practice spans across primarily installation, sculpture and textiles, often along with computational, sensory components. By looking at phenomena such as survivalists and “preppers”, DIY-energy generation, unidentified deep sea frequencies, discontinued research stations and the connection between mycelium and digital data distribution her work focuses on that which inhabits the underground or exists in the periphery.