Humanities & Cultures

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 responsible for some of Australia’s most popular exhibitions. 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.

Radical Textiles at the Art Gallery of South Australia revels in its rejections of this bias and in its enthusiastic reverence for expert craft. Nearly 200 works are on show, gathered from more than 150 artists, designers and activists from Australia and abroad, and ranging from tapestries to trousers, union banners to sewn sculptures – disparate forms that communicate shared ideas about community, empathy and collective identity.