With Every Fiber: GROUP EXHIBITION
Aicon Contemporary
With Every Fiber was an exhibition exploring the narrative, political, and emotional capacities of textile art. It was presented at Aicon Contemporary from July 18th to August 10th, 2024, and brought together artists whose practices challenged the historical marginalization of textiles within the contemporary art canon.
“Along with cave paintings, threads were among the first transmitters of meaning,” wrote Anni Albers in On Weaving. Even so, for much of contemporary art history, textile arts were categorized and dismissed as craft. Over recent decades, the long-implied gap between mediums was bridged by artists working beyond the Western art canon.
As the contemporary art world increasingly embraced textile practices, the supposed dichotomy between “craft” and “art” was both challenged and examined. Hierarchies that placed fabric beneath the paintbrush were often shaped by cultural, gendered, and regional biases. With every stitch, the artists in this exhibition engaged with their own experiences, losses, and histories shaped by those same prejudices.
Historically, textile arts functioned as tools of storytelling as much as objects of use. From Raphael’s tapestries recounting Gospel scenes on a monumental scale to a great-great-grandmother’s quilt passed down through generations, textiles carried ancestral, cultural, and regional histories as intrinsically as the threads from which they were made.
Despite the skill and artistry textile work demanded, textiles were rarely regarded as more than “craft” until recent movements. This marginalization stemmed both from the ubiquity of textiles in daily life and from the social implications of a field pioneered largely by women and artists from the Global South. As a result, its labor often went unrecognized.
The artists in With Every Fiber challenged these outdated notions, dismantling the politics that relegated textile work to the margins of the art world. Through repurposed cultural fabrics, empathetic organic forms, and stitched self-portraits, they moved beyond both traditional practices and conventional ways of thinking.
With Every Fiber presented textiles as both tangible manifestations of labor and extensions of the canvas. Even within this contemporary shift, the narrative thread remained embedded in every stitch—intentional or otherwise—each carrying the weight of the cultural histories that preceded it.
Alice Kettle (b. 1961, UK) is considered a pioneer in her field. Building on the historical tradition of textile storytelling and often working at a monumental scale, her work moves between literary allusion, global events, and lived experience. Human emotion is central to her practice, both in imagery and in the act of stitching itself. Combining traditional techniques with contemporary approaches, her work invites personal introspection and cultural reflection. Kettle is a Professor of Textile Arts at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. Her work is held in 23 international public collections and has been exhibited worldwide. She lives and works in the UK.
