A major new exhibition, Radical Textiles, featuring works such as Sally Smart's Performance/Punokawan/Chout (The Choreography of Cutting) and Yinka Shonibare’s Refugee Astronaut, highlights the emotional and revolutionary force of textiles. On display until March 30, 2025, the exhibition explores union banners, sewn sculptures, and the historical communal aspect of textile-making.
Sally Smart ’s Performance/Punokawan/Chout , with Yinka Shonibare’s Refugee Astronaut to the right. Radical Textiles is open at the Art Gallery of South Australia until 30 March 2025. Sally Smart ’s Performance/Punokawan/Chout , with Yinka Shonibare’s Refugee Astronaut to the right. Radical Textiles is open at the Art Gallery of South Australia until 30 March 2025.
Manual textile-making has historically been a communal process, too, providing space for conversation, solidarity and, sometimes, resistance. Over the past decade, textile arts have been. And yet as a form, textiles have a history of marginalisation in the high art world; associated with women, domesticity, First Nations traditions, and queer and class activism. They have been ignored or dismissed by the “pale, male and stale” art canon.
On the opposite wall hangs another quilted work: local panels from the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Begun in 1989 to commemorate South Australians lost to HIV/AIDS, a panel reading “I will always love you Scott” evokes the devastating simplicity of grief. These are artefacts of two different social experiences of love, representing the experiences of two different communities, and yet such is the soft familiarity of a quilt that the love they record is sensory and palpable.
So it registers as a human loss when Katie-Louise describes the encounters with young fashion students, who increasingly study design without learning the physical craft of making. The deliberate sensitivity of Nicol & Ford designs to the uniqueness of human bodies results from Katie-Louise’s training in patternmaking, cutting, tailoring – yet some schools are now helping students outsource their graduating portfolio collections for overseas manufacture.
RADICAL TEXTILES ART GALLERY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA SALLY SMART YINKA SHONIBARE TEXTILE ARTS
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