A low but insistent noise greets visitors entering Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles at the Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre, near Coventry in the UK. It emanates from the kinetic installation occupying the centre of the exhibition space: a whirring conveyor belt called Slacker (2019) by the British sculptor Holly Hendry. The rubbery synthetic loop trundling around the metal rollers reveals a disconcerting collection of flattened body parts – a parade of cartoon eyelashes, bared teeth, fleshy pink intestines and hairy legs pass before your eyes.

On the wall behind it, Paloma Proudfoot’s ceramic relief The Mannequins Reply (2023) presents another sinister tableau of bodily decomposition: some of the mannequins have peeled off their skin along with their clothes. The London-based artist’s delicate glazed-clay textures mimic the flayed muscles of a woman’s back as elegantly as her companions’ fishnet leotard, a sheer skirt and plait of hair. The closeness and even collapse, between skin and cloth, emerges as a running theme through the exhibition.

In the corner of the gallery looms Phyllida Barlow’s imposing sculpture, untitled: canvasracks (2018-19), an ensemble of candy-coloured canvases draped insouciantly over solid concrete feet. Gangly, playful and a little scruffy, it has all the hallmarks of the late British artist’s so-called “anti-monumental” sculptures. The installation manages to be both painterly and performative, radiating a kind of inner life.

But are any of these works recognisable as “textile art”? And how helpful are those definitions, anyway? That is also the point being eloquently made by the exhibition’s guest curator, the French-born artist Caroline Achaintre. Having worked for 20 years with hand-tufted wool—a physical process of shooting fibres through a high-pressure gun from the back to the front of her shaggy wall hangings—Achaintre refuses to “pigeonhole” herself in the realms of craft and the decorative to which textiles were for so long relegated by art history. “I never thought of myself as a textile artist, just an artist,” she says in a conversation with STIR.

Her organisation of Material Worlds, presented by Hayward Gallery Touring, is true to form, celebrating the diverse roles textiles play within contemporary artistic imagination. It follows a range of museum exhibitions that seek to bust old stereotypes of textiles as a lesser art form, a mere creation of the hand compared to the lofty concepts of painting and sculpture. It sits in the company of Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, currently at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam after a run at the Barbican in London and Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, a touring show that will come to the Museum of Modern Art in New York next April after stops at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

It is no coincidence that a medium associated with women’s work and the domestic sphere has long been critically and commercially undervalued. For the past decade, curators and critics have been reappraising figures like the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz and Americans Sheila Hicks and Lenore Tawney, who participated in the female-led fibre art movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. Hicks, who is now 90, has been working consistently but “maybe never had more exposure than now”, Achaintre says. The Gee’s Bend quilters, an intergenerational community of Black women artists descended from enslaved people in Alabama, have gradually cemented their place in mainstream art-world consciousness since their first major US museum show in 2002.

But having participated in many textile-based group shows, Achaintre is determined to stretch understandings of the medium beyond its well-trodden history of marginalisation. “I like to think we are aware of it and can move on to the next level,” she says. The feminist reclamation of cloth is deployed to brutal effect in Ukraine-born Anna Perach’s grotesque Venus (2023), an anatomical doll of a naked pregnant woman in Axminster yarn, lying prone on a dissection table with her womb exposed. However, the other works in the show are tangled up with themes of sci-fi, folklore, ritual, race and industrialisation, spinning out yarns so distinctive that the textile label seems almost redundant.

Like Perach’s tabletop Venus, Rae-Yen Song’s sculptural mash-up of appliquéd fabric heads and unsettling papier-mâché masks doubles up as a costume that can also be worn for performances. The young Glasgow-based multimedia artist created song dynasty ○○○ (2021) as a homage to the well-loved dining tablecloth from their childhood home, an object that figuratively and now enfolds the entire family unit.

Alexandre da Cunha’s Arena (2020) also estranges an everyday material, deconstructing a host of umbrellas and stitching them together into a fluttering curtain of black-and-white lozenges. Op Art abstraction meets the big-top tent at the circus. The work hangs away from the wall, allowing for a fuller appreciation of the patterns of light and shadow cast by the holes in the fabric. The readymade is central to the Brazilian-born artist’s practice, which he has described as “pointing” to alternative meanings in what already exists rather than “making” from scratch. Identifying a suitable object is like casting an actor, he has said, like “seeing people in the street who you think might have the potential to perform something”.

If there is a common denominator that unites the works in this exhibition, it is in the dynamic and shape-shifting quality of textiles. Achaintre recalls how, when she was first introduced to tufting by the textiles department at Goldsmiths College, it was the “uncanniness of the material” that appealed to her. Wool, known in its domesticated form as the stuff of shagpile rugs, could be made ambiguous, strange and even monstrous when transformed into the artist’s mask-like compositions. They are “always characters”, she says, but never fixed, each containing “different aspects of one’s persona”. The hairy mohair-on-steel piece included in the show, HEL (2023), has six gaping orifices and “is dealing with some sort of decay”.

In all our lives, clothes are signifiers of self-expression and deeply personal cultural identity, but they can also disguise and transform the wearer. We dress up and down according to our mood and the image we want to project into the world. So it is little wonder that artists would be interested in textiles as a medium – one among many – through which to invent new worlds. By turns funny, fantastical, grisly, invigorating and thought-provoking, the works gathered in Material Worlds push the boundaries of what we imagine as textile art. For Achaintre, there is a “charge of energy” latent in them waiting to be unleashed, both in dialogue with one another and with the audience.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.