Fabric: Touch and Identity: GROUP EXHIBITION CO-CURATED BY ALICE KETTLE
Compton Verney Gallery

Playful and provocative, this exhibition explored how the qualities of cloth conceal, reveal, and seduce through the prisms of art, design, film, and dance. The drape, fold, touch, and feel of fabric were used to examine identity as a sensual, gendered, and political experience. Works by a range of international artists, working in different media, developed the intimate, playful, exciting and seductive qualities of fabric, revealing the fundamental role that it has played in defining identity.

Curated by Alice Kettle (Professor Emeritus, Manchester Metropolitan University) and Professor Lesley Millar (University for the Creative Arts), the exhibition was developed from their three-year research project The Erotic Cloth and the publication The Erotic Cloth (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

'A cliché-busting project, which pushed past easy assumptions about gender and sexuality'

The Arts Society Magazine

The exhibition was shown at Compton Verney Gallery with 16 artists, drawn from an international, contemporary and historical cohort, ranging from Joshua Reynolds to Cathy de Monchaux, from a traditional Haori Shunga (erotic) kimono to a specially commissioned, immersive installation by Japanese designer Reiko Sudo.The exhibition was divided into three themes, however the dividing line between the themes was as fluid as the cloth itself.

ONE: Sensuous ClothFor centuries, the personal, tactile relationship between cloth and the body has permeated a range of art forms. For the portraitist, the accurate depiction of fabric becomes an essential narrative tool; with the drape and texture of a sitter's outfit clothing them in layers of meaning. The sculptor traces the lines of the body with cloth, while for the dancer, body and cloth form a shared relationship of veiling and revealing. The works on display here also explore the sensual appeal of cloth in movement: ambiguous, embracing and seemingly impossible to contain.

TWO: The Responsive BodyOur clothing is our second skin, meaning that fabric plays an essential role in sexuality, intimacy and the fashioning of personal identities. Bringing together the private and public spheres, some of the pieces on display in this room are overtly political, representing personal responses to issues, fantasies or questions that were facing their creators. In all of the works cloth is the medium of choice: richly permeated with bodily experiences, its cut, feel, smell, and sound can both engage our senses and subvert our expectations.

THREE: Between Cloth and SkinCloth traces and echoes the body, falling, rippling around and draping the form, enfolding the space between being and becoming. Overlooked, everyday aspects of our lives maintain the imprint of our passing, recorded by, in or on cloth; the surfaces reminding us that both cloth and skin may be cut, or pierced or simply witness to the passage of time. The works in this room use fabric to reference the absent body, the space between and around the body: what has been, what might have been...