Touchlines: The Delicate Boundaries of Care and Cloth
This May, Sunny Bank Mills in Farsley, Yorkshire, hosts the 62 Group of Textile Artists' 2026 exhibition: Touchlines: The Delicate Boundaries of Care and Cloth. Developed in collaboration with Anna Turzynski, the Mills' Arts Director, the theme draws on the site's industrial and cultural history to explore threshold spaces — those moments where contact is felt, withheld, or transformed.
Ealish Wilson, Gossamer Layers
Each year the group responds to a new brief, and this year's is rooted in the specifics of place. The exhibition draws parallels between textile labour, sporting cultures, and human relationships, asking how boundaries shape intimacy, care, and collective identity. The touchline of the title is borrowed from sport — the edge of the pitch, the line between participant and witness — but across these material-led and process-driven works it opens into something wider where cloth emerges as a site for emotional and social histories.
Helen Yardley, Lineout.
Among the artists exhibiting, Debbie Lyddon's The Breath of the Moon traces the contours of a semidiurnal tide across a single lunar day, marking an unstable boundary as a living touchline. Heather Belcher's Instructions for Knitting considers cloth-making as an act of care — one in which edges may be cut away and the idea of a fixed self is permitted to loosen. Helen Yardley's Lineout responds to the theme through the energy of rugby, with felted wool, echoing the physical pressure that defines the game. Hannah White's Woven Touchlines uses soft stainless steel threads to form a conductive woven network within the cloth, transforming touch into material structure.
Vanessa Rolf, Rights of Passage (detail).
Other works move into more personal territory. Anne Smith's Hope and Cindy, slowly pieced and hand sewn, holds a fleeting vision of friendship between two girls. Julie Heaton's Dad stitches a tender moment between father and grandsons, made in the wake of loss. Claire Barber's Sweepings — made from heather, chalk, Yorkshire stone, and melted shoelaces — marks a touchline between labour, land, and waste. Sally Spinks traces the depressions left in her late mother's carpet in Lasting Impression, rendered in wool and cashmere, while Vanessa Rolf's Rights of Passage works with indigo-dyed, hand-stitched cotton to create soft forms that envelop and hold.
Helen Davies, National Union of Had Enough of This Shite Work
Helen Davies brings a more defiant note with National Union of Had Enough of This Shite Work — a needle-lace union banner referencing the Plug Riots of 1842. Jane Walkley's tapestry and casting work memorialises artefacts handled by mill workers, and Marcia Bennett-Male's felt and fabric triptych draws on the football and rugby heritage of the surrounding area.
Across the breadth of the exhibition, the works share a common thread: an attention to what accumulates at the edges of things — the worn path, the frayed seam, the unspoken gesture. Touchlines makes space for all of it.
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Further Information:
Touchlines: The Delicate Boundaries of Care and Cloth is on show from 1 - 31 May, 2026 at Sunny Bank mills, Farsley, Leeds, UK. It is free to attend, and runs alongside the For the Love of Textiles exhibition and the Threads Textile Festival on 16th and 17th May.
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The 62 Group of Textile Artists
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Image Credits:
Lead: Debbie Lydon, The Breath of the Moon. For Touchlines, Debbie has traced the contours of a semidiurnal tide across a single lunar day, marking this unstable boundary as a living touchline.
All further images courtesy of The 62 Group, and as credited in captions.