Sunday Read: Textiles × Art: How Textiles Are Shaping Contemporary Art

In recent years, textiles have moved decisively from the margins of contemporary art to its very centre. Textiles × Art: How Textiles Are Shaping Contemporary Art, by Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson, offers a timely and expansive survey of this shift, tracing how fibre, cloth and thread have become some of the most potent materials through which artists address the complexities of the present moment.

Cover Artwork for Textiles × Art: How Textiles Are Shaping Contemporary Art by Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson

Published by Thames & Hudson and richly illustrated with more than 300 images, the book brings together the work of forty-four artists from across the globe. Rather than positioning textiles as a niche or medium-specific category, Barry and Jobson present cloth as a shared, deeply human language — one that collapses distinctions between art and craft, the personal and the political, tradition and innovation.

The authors begin from a simple but profound premise: textiles are everywhere. From cradle to grave, they shape our environments, bodies and memories. Yet for much of Western art history, textiles were rendered invisible or dismissed as decorative or domestic — categorisations that mirrored broader hierarchies of gender, labour and power. Textiles × Art charts how contemporary artists are actively undoing these legacies, reclaiming textile techniques as tools of resistance, storytelling and critical inquiry.

Inside Spread: Page 48 and 49, featuring Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir / Shoplifter

What emerges is a picture of textile practice as both materially grounded and conceptually expansive. Artists featured in the book work with weaving, embroidery, quilting, dyeing and beading to address urgent themes including identity, migration, environmental collapse, colonial histories and systems of labour. For some, textiles function as a bridge to ancestral knowledge and Indigenous traditions; for others, they offer a way to interrogate the violence and exploitation embedded in global textile economies.

Inside Spread: Page 20 and 21, featuring Eleanor Anderson

Barry and Jobson are careful to avoid well-trodden narratives or headline names. Instead, they foreground a diverse range of practices, revealing the connective threads that run between artists working in vastly different cultural and geographic contexts. From handwoven tapestries that respond to digital culture, to sculptural installations that explore gendered bodies and care, the works gathered here demonstrate the remarkable flexibility of textiles as a contemporary artistic language.

Inside Spread: Pages 30 and 31, featuring Maria Appleton

The book is equally attentive to process. Many artists describe finding their voice through textile techniques — often inherited, communal or learned outside formal art institutions. This distance from the patriarchal hierarchies of fine art has allowed textiles to become a space of experimentation and liberation, where material knowledge and conceptual depth are inseparable.

Inside Spread: Pages 136 and 137, featuring Troy Emery

At its core, Textiles × Art is not simply a survey of a medium “having a moment”, but a compelling argument for why textiles matter now. In a technologically saturated and increasingly polarised world, the tactile, time-intensive nature of textile work offers a way to reconnect with embodied experience and shared humanity. Barry and Jobson’s book makes clear that textiles are not returning to contemporary art — they are reshaping it.

-

Further Information:

Textiles × Art: How Textiles Are Shaping Contemporary Art is available now from Thames and Hudson USA

UK and Europe release: February 2026

-

Image Credits:

Lead: White Sands, 2018, site-specific installation composed of various textiles, vinyl and thread. Rachel Hayes x Missoni. Photos: Missoni.

All further images as credited in photo captions.