Cutting Through Folklore: Textile Artists Bring Ancient Stories to Chelsea
Molly Lester spends her week moving between two very different kinds of needlework. In one setting, she hand-sews ecclesiastical garments, following techniques passed down through generations of church textile makers. In her own studio, she quilts scenes of English life that are darkly funny and faintly macabre, stitched with the same patience but none of the reverence. That tension between the sacred and the subversive runs right through Folklore, Myths & Legends, the fourth exhibition curated by artist Venetia Higgins at The Gallery at Green & Stone, opening this October.
The show gathers 35 artists and 175 works across painting, ceramics, woodwork, printmaking, sculpture, metalwork and textiles, all responding to the folk tales, symbols and beliefs that have shaped how people make sense of the world. Five artists bring textile work into the mix: Bellamy Jean, Molly Lester, Emma Carlow, Marion Elliot and Milly Amber, each approaching craft and storytelling from a different angle.
Bellamy Jean, Chains of Love, textile collage in linen with embroidery details, 43 x 43cm.
Bellamy Jean specialises in original and bespoke embroidery, though her research reaches well beyond the hoop. She works through alchemy, spirituality and the symbolic languages found across world religions, translating ancient iconography into contemporary abstraction. Her palette and geometry draw on Hilma af Klint, with structural inspirations from Josef Albers, and the movement in her compositions recalling Alexander Calder's sculpture. What holds it all together is heritage technique: quilting and appliqué stitched with enough precision that the mysticism never overwhelms the craft.
Millie Amber, The Three Graces - Hand Embroidered Banner
Millie Amber works in a different register entirely, hand-embroidering wall hangings, bandanas and small ornaments that draw on folk art, floral motifs and vintage fabric. Beadwork and gold-plated charms turn up alongside raw silk, and her recurring floral hearts and garden motifs give her pieces a warmth that sits well against the exhibition's darker mythologies. Each piece reads as intentional rather than decorative, thread used to hold a specific feeling in place.
Emma Carlow, Harvest Betrothal, Cyanotype on antique French linen, 80 x 60cm
Emma Carlow works at the meeting point of textiles, printmaking and cyanotype, a photographic process that fixes images using sunlight and iron salts. Her practice is research-led, drawing on folk art and vernacular history to build worlds that blur memory and invention. As a founding member of the Scherzo Collective, she has shown work internationally, including through the Royal Academy, and her cyanotypes carry the same half-remembered quality that folklore itself so often has, altered a little with each telling.
Marion Elliot, 'Quilting' cut-paper collage.
Marion Elliot approaches storytelling through cut paper rather than cloth, though her intricate collages owe a clear debt to textile pattern and construction. Drawing on hand-painted signage, religious iconography and printed ephemera, she builds richly layered compositions that treat everyday visual culture with real seriousness. Elliot has also written 25 books on design, paper engineering and textiles, and her work here sits comfortably alongside the show's stitched and woven pieces, a reminder that pattern-making crosses media without losing its logic.
Curator Venetia Higgins, who studied History of Art at Edinburgh before training at the Royal Drawing School, describes the exhibition as an extension of her own painting practice, which draws on medieval manuscripts and natural history. Her foreword writer, Morvern Graham, puts it plainly: folklore survives because it keeps being remade by new hands and new materials.
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Further Information:
Folklore, Myths & Legends runs from 6–17 October 2026 at The Gallery at Green & Stone, 251–253 Fulham Road, Chelsea, London SW3 6HY. Monday to Saturday, 10am–5pm. Admission free.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Molly Lester, Hold fast thy ground! Textile - Silk and Cotton, 57 x 75 cm, 2026
All further images as credited in captions.