Hayward Gallery Touring
October 9, 2024–May 15, 2026
Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry (October 9, 2024–December 15, 2024)
Djanogly Gallery, Lakeside Arts, Nottingham (May 2025–July 2025)
The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum, Cheltenham (September 2025–January 2026)
Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, London (January 2026–May 2026)
Hayward Gallery Touring’s ambitious group exhibition Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles explores how artists are using textiles in surprising and radical ways. Illuminating the diverse roles textiles play in contemporary artistic practice, the exhibition brings together artists who take the intimate, everyday and domestic quality of textiles and transform them into theatrical, bold, unsettling and humorous artworks that create worlds and tell stories ranging from the personal to the cosmic.
Featuring work created predominantly over the last decade by 15 UK-based artists, Material Worlds highlights their deep awareness of textiles’ cultural history and a shared desire to challenge its traditional associations, testing the material’s expansive and subversive potential. The familiar fabric of everyday life is reimagined into the unexpected—the ordinary made extraordinary—to reflect on ideas of gender, identity, community, race, technology, and myth, demonstrating the medium’s potential to transform in the hands of different artists.
Artworks presented in Material Worlds will include Phyllida Barlow’s Untitled: Canvasracks. (2018–2019), an imposing yet anti-monumental sculpture made from vibrant multicoloured cotton canvas draped over concrete and wooden plinths; Holly Hendry’s kinetic sculpture Slacker (2019) which uses synthetic materials, fabrics, and reused plastics to create a ‘skin’ that rotates through industrial steel rollers in a rhythmic motion, inspired by the historical Jacquard loom; Paloma Proudfoot’s The Mannequins Reply (2023), a ceramic assemblage with textile details that draws upon the visual language of anatomical models and is informed by the artist's background in clothes making and pattern cutting; to Paul Maheke’s installation We Took a Sip from the Devil’s Cup (2020) that brings together a series of drawings bleached into fabric, along with hand-blown glass lamps. The spectral drawings on fabrics are loosely based on a divinatory reading of patterns undergone by the artist and engage with the realm of the invisible.
Featured artists
Caroline Achaintre, Jonathan Baldock, Phyllida Barlow, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Alexandre da Cunha, Holly Hendry, Tonico Lemos Auad, Paul Maheke, Anna Perach, Yelena Popova, Paloma Proudfoot, Yinka Shonibare, Rae-Yen Song, Tenant of Culture and Zadie Xa.
Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles is curated by artist Caroline Achaintre with Hayward Gallery Touring. It will open at Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, from October 9–December 15, 2024 before continuing a national tour.
Sitting at the heart of the Southbank Centre, Hayward Gallery Touring is the UK’s largest contemporary art organisation producing touring exhibitions.
