Textiles and Art maps the surge of fibre, fabric, and thread into the centre of contemporary art practice, surveying forty-four artists whose work deploys weaving, embroidery, quilting, and dyeing as instruments of critical inquiry rather than decoration.
About This Book
Something has shifted in contemporary art: the loom, the needle, and the dye bath have moved from the margins of craft into the mainstream of gallery and biennale culture. Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson trace this resurgence across a genuinely global field, examining how artists are working with traditional textile techniques while directing them toward urgent subjects — identity, gender, migration, and environmental crisis. The forty-four artists surveyed here demonstrate that cloth is not a soft medium in any sense: it carries history, labour, and resistance in its very structure. This survey draws a clear line between textile art's decorative past and its present role as a site of serious cultural production, repositioning the boundary between craft and fine art in the process.
Key Features
- 303 pages of full-colour survey spanning forty-four contemporary artists working in textile art globally
- Authors: Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson
- Published by Thames & Hudson
What You'll Discover
- How weaving, embroidery, quilting, and dyeing are being pushed beyond their traditional limits by artists engaging with contemporary critical themes
- The way textile art addresses identity, gender, migration, and environmental concerns with a directness that other mediums struggle to match
- The historical tension between craft and fine art, and how forty-four artists are actively redrawing that boundary
- Why cloth functions as a site of resistance and storytelling — carrying the weight of labour, memory, and cultural specificity within its material structure
About the Author
Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson are the co-authors of this global survey of contemporary textile art. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 303
- Dimensions: 208 x 261 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781760764999
- Publisher: Thames & Hudson
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Artists, curators, textile designers, and students of contemporary art and craft theory who want to understand how fibre and fabric have become central to critical art practice.