Paul Smith: Fabric of Life
Sir Paul Smith is known as a designer of elegant, menswear, with stripes as his calling card. He is also a renowned collector with numerous disparate collections, elements of which he has displayed in-store, alongside his tailoring, casual-wear and accessories, since the 1970s. In his headquarters store in Albemarle Street in London, he has combined the two sides of his creativity in a new gallery in the basement. In his current exhibition, Fabric of Life, he presents not only items of his furniture but artwork that resonates with the company’s ethos of creativity.
Image: Carolina Mazzolari, Map 21.
Image above: Kimathi Mafafo, Untitled.
The gallery kicks off with a show curated by art curator Catherine Loewe. It started as an online show under the auspices of the digital and virtual reality producer Vortic, who specialises in sustainably curating and sharing exhibitions “with any viewer, anywhere in the world.” However, by happy accident, the curator’s friend Katie Heller had just started to work with Smith and suggested that Loewe mount the show in the new gallery. So it is both an online show and a physical one.
Loewe comes from the tradition of Fine Art curation but became beguiled by using textiles to express ideas. “I spent a year researching these artists, whilst examining the power of fabric to reveal deep psychological narratives and explore a wide range of themes that carry personal, social, political and cultural histories,” she explains. She has brought together an eclectic group of twenty eight international artists from 15 countries, working with textile techniques including dying, weaving, embroidery, collage and painting. All the work is for sale.
There are 2 striking recent embroidered works by Alice Kettle showing large, powerful figures, one highlighted with Lurex thread. In the mix are three-dimensional organic, almost surreal works by the Brazilian artist Maria Nepomuceno, who uses a variety of techniques including rope weaving, straw braiding as well as the sewing coils of coloured rope in spirals. She incorporates found objects like beads and ceramic forms. Nepomuceno explores identity, spirituality and the experience of being a mixed-race Brazilian woman. One of those in the gallery seems to allude to a woman’s reproductive system.
Image: Camilla Emson, Kissing Vessels.
More traditional in technique if not in content, are works by American tapestry artist Erin Riley, which deal with the search for self-identity, relationships, memories, fantasies, sexual violence, and trauma. The tapestries are woven selfies, depicting self-image, tattoos and intimate elements of Riley’s body, usually alongside a phone. Upstairs in its own space is an arresting red crochet ‘painting’ by Emily Moore, who works across painting and with yarn and weaving. Her mantra is wildness rooted in the notion of exploration.
The curator intends the show to talk of feminism, yet includes male artists, whose practice is not concerned with that. For example, there are a surprising number of large oval works by Spanish artist, Secundino Hernández. The rough squares of cloth are collaged together and overpainted. Eduardo Terraza’s tightly placed squares of wool are a distinctly modernist geometric abstraction take on Mexican folk techniques. Neither they nor Andreas Eriksson’s muted topographical tapestries examine feminist or personal issues.
Image: Andreas Eriksson, Glitter.
The logic of the hang is not obvious, with works positioned with no seeming reference to particular themes. In the basement gallery, there would have been more scope for a thematic interpretation. The space allows pieces to be hung, gallery style on the walls but also alongside furniture from Sir Paul’s collection. In some ways, this makes it easy to see how textile art can sit in the domestic environment. Striking examples include the Italian artist Carolina Mazzorlani’s stuffed, hand-dyed embroidered cotton on silk piece or the Dutch artist Anne von Freyburg’s stuffed, embellished, be-fringed and bejewelled highly decorative rococo work that plays with the female history of textiles and the idea of craft as a subform.
Upstairs the hanging is often high on the walls above the shelves or racks of clothes. Whilst this may well encourage shoppers not normally interested in art, to take a closer look, it makes it harder to maintain any thematic references. Some pieces are large enough to command full wall spaces, but others like the tapestries/rug hooking of the Welsh-Ghanaian Anya Painstsil deserve a better hang. They are positioned high on the wall above clothes racks making it difficult to experience the full excitement of her three-dimensional pieces which incorporate weaves, braids, and even her hair and explore ideas of the female gaze, personal relationships and collective prejudices. (They would sit well with Riley’s work which explores similar themes.) Even South African Kimathi Mafafo specially commissioned, densely hand and machine stitched embroidery on fabric, depicting intense foliage is hard to explore, hung as it is, above the tills.
Image: Alice Kettle, Lightness Of Blue.
One of the problems with the show is that there is no background information on view, making it hard to distinguish themes. Loewe is keen to express that textile has been seen as a feminine art and has therefore been undervalued. However, Loewe makes a distinction between fine art and craft. “Most (of the selected people) are artists, not craftspeople.” Yet that is a specious distinction. It is a continuum. Makers can also be fine artists and vice versa.
There is little explanation of techniques and materials which would have been helpful to an audience unfamiliar with such works. Whilst the show presents some of the artists who were in the Arnolfini exhibition, ‘Threads: Breathing Stories into Materials,’ here the works are not displayed with any comprehensible categorisation or indeed intellectual rigour, despite Loewe describing the work as addressing themes “that carry personal, social, political and cultural histories,” particularly feminist ones. The show however is worth a visit in person to check out the individual works, but sadly the whole makes no convincing argument.
Fabric of Life is on how at Paul Smith Headquarters Store, Albemarle Street, London until 17 November 2024.
Find out more and plan your visit:
programme.vortic.art/exhibitions/fabric-of-life-curated-by-catherine-loewe
Image: Carolina Mazzolari, Map 21.
Image above: Kimathi Mafafo, Untitled.
The gallery kicks off with a show curated by art curator Catherine Loewe. It started as an online show under the auspices of the digital and virtual reality producer Vortic, who specialises in sustainably curating and sharing exhibitions “with any viewer, anywhere in the world.” However, by happy accident, the curator’s friend Katie Heller had just started to work with Smith and suggested that Loewe mount the show in the new gallery. So it is both an online show and a physical one.
Loewe comes from the tradition of Fine Art curation but became beguiled by using textiles to express ideas. “I spent a year researching these artists, whilst examining the power of fabric to reveal deep psychological narratives and explore a wide range of themes that carry personal, social, political and cultural histories,” she explains. She has brought together an eclectic group of twenty eight international artists from 15 countries, working with textile techniques including dying, weaving, embroidery, collage and painting. All the work is for sale.
There are 2 striking recent embroidered works by Alice Kettle showing large, powerful figures, one highlighted with Lurex thread. In the mix are three-dimensional organic, almost surreal works by the Brazilian artist Maria Nepomuceno, who uses a variety of techniques including rope weaving, straw braiding as well as the sewing coils of coloured rope in spirals. She incorporates found objects like beads and ceramic forms. Nepomuceno explores identity, spirituality and the experience of being a mixed-race Brazilian woman. One of those in the gallery seems to allude to a woman’s reproductive system.
More traditional in technique if not in content, are works by American tapestry artist Erin Riley, which deal with the search for self-identity, relationships, memories, fantasies, sexual violence, and trauma. The tapestries are woven selfies, depicting self-image, tattoos and intimate elements of Riley’s body, usually alongside a phone. Upstairs in its own space is an arresting red crochet ‘painting’ by Emily Moore, who works across painting and with yarn and weaving. Her mantra is wildness rooted in the notion of exploration.
The curator intends the show to talk of feminism, yet includes male artists, whose practice is not concerned with that. For example, there are a surprising number of large oval works by Spanish artist, Secundino Hernández. The rough squares of cloth are collaged together and overpainted. Eduardo Terraza’s tightly placed squares of wool are a distinctly modernist geometric abstraction take on Mexican folk techniques. Neither they nor Andreas Eriksson’s muted topographical tapestries examine feminist or personal issues.
The logic of the hang is not obvious, with works positioned with no seeming reference to particular themes. In the basement gallery, there would have been more scope for a thematic interpretation. The space allows pieces to be hung, gallery style on the walls but also alongside furniture from Sir Paul’s collection. In some ways, this makes it easy to see how textile art can sit in the domestic environment. Striking examples include the Italian artist Carolina Mazzorlani’s stuffed, hand-dyed embroidered cotton on silk piece or the Dutch artist Anne von Freyburg’s stuffed, embellished, be-fringed and bejewelled highly decorative rococo work that plays with the female history of textiles and the idea of craft as a subform.
Upstairs the hanging is often high on the walls above the shelves or racks of clothes. Whilst this may well encourage shoppers not normally interested in art, to take a closer look, it makes it harder to maintain any thematic references. Some pieces are large enough to command full wall spaces, but others like the tapestries/rug hooking of the Welsh-Ghanaian Anya Painstsil deserve a better hang. They are positioned high on the wall above clothes racks making it difficult to experience the full excitement of her three-dimensional pieces which incorporate weaves, braids, and even her hair and explore ideas of the female gaze, personal relationships and collective prejudices. (They would sit well with Riley’s work which explores similar themes.) Even South African Kimathi Mafafo specially commissioned, densely hand and machine stitched embroidery on fabric, depicting intense foliage is hard to explore, hung as it is, above the tills.
One of the problems with the show is that there is no background information on view, making it hard to distinguish themes. Loewe is keen to express that textile has been seen as a feminine art and has therefore been undervalued. However, Loewe makes a distinction between fine art and craft. “Most (of the selected people) are artists, not craftspeople.” Yet that is a specious distinction. It is a continuum. Makers can also be fine artists and vice versa.
There is little explanation of techniques and materials which would have been helpful to an audience unfamiliar with such works. Whilst the show presents some of the artists who were in the Arnolfini exhibition, ‘Threads: Breathing Stories into Materials,’ here the works are not displayed with any comprehensible categorisation or indeed intellectual rigour, despite Loewe describing the work as addressing themes “that carry personal, social, political and cultural histories,” particularly feminist ones. The show however is worth a visit in person to check out the individual works, but sadly the whole makes no convincing argument.
Fabric of Life is on how at Paul Smith Headquarters Store, Albemarle Street, London until 17 November 2024.
Find out more and plan your visit:
programme.vortic.art/exhibitions/fabric-of-life-curated-by-catherine-loewe