At the Forefront: Textiles at Collect 2026
From 26 February to 1 March 2026, Collect Art Fair returns to Somerset House in London. Presented by Crafts Council, the fair has been at the forefront of the contemporary craft movement since its establishment in 2004, and remains a leading international art fair dedicated to contemporary craft and design.
Jingyi Li, Obedient Objects – Chair, 2025. Handmade Filet lace, vintage chair. Photo: Jingyi Li
Spread across three wings of the neoclassical landmark, Collect provides a global marketplace for museum curators, interior designers and collectors seeking the finest contemporary craft. Prestigious galleries and organisations are selected by an advisory panel, together presenting the work of 300 artists. A majority of pieces are made within the last five years, with many also commissioned especially for the fair. Under the leadership of new Fair Director TF Chan, the 2026 edition continues this commitment while deepening conversations around material culture and collectible design.
Darcey Fleming, winner of the Collect Art Fair and Brookefield Properties Craft Award 2026. As represented by House of Bandits by Sarabande.
A wide range of disciplines are represented — from ceramics, glass and metalwork to furniture, jewellery and wood — yet textiles emerge as one of the fair’s most compelling threads. Across the stands, cloth operates as narrative device, sculptural form and political language.
That presence extends beyond the booth format in Collect Open, where textiles unfold at architectural scale. Kamilah Ahmed’s suspended installation The Life Above (lead image) draws on Dhaka’s layered cityscape and the legacy of Jamdani weaving, pairing hand-wrapped silk warps with embroidery to explore transparency and density, fragility and resilience. In doing so, she positions stitch as a spatial language shaped by cultural continuity.
Richard McVetis, The Edge of Forever, 2025. Hand embroidery, cotton on wool.
At BlueRider ART, Deng Wen Jen’s intricate embroideries depict Taiwanese dishes with deceptive delicacy. Beneath their sweetness lies an exploration of food history, cultural geography and belonging. At Cavaliero Finn, Richard McVetis transforms repetition into meditative precision, his meticulous hand embroidery mapping time through stitch. Language itself becomes material in Stephanie Stoker’s works, presented by Craft Alliance, where text is embedded within cloth, partially concealed and reconfigured.
Woven artworks by Alex Rocca, represented by JIG gallery.
First-time exhibitor Majeda Clarke, shown by Design-Nation, will debut new woven works for 2026, signalling the fair’s role as a springboard for evolving practices. Alex Rocca, a visual artist and textile designer from Curitiba, similarly bridges handcrafted tradition with new narrative forms. Working across varied textures and materials, his practice carries cultural and aesthetic meanings rooted in Afro-Brazilian ancestry and symbolisms connected to African-origin cultures and spiritual traditions — positioning textile as a bearer of memory and identity.
Lay with Me in the Long Grass, 2025. Cotton organdie, foraged grasses and silk thread, 56 x 200cm.
Selvedge readers may also wish to seek out new embroidered works by Katerina Knight, Assistant to the Editor at Selvedge, who will be exhibiting with Ruup & Form. Her piece Lay With Me in the Long Grass grew from a daily ritual in Malvern: gathering ten stems of grass at sunrise and stitching them each evening onto cotton organdie — a quiet meditation on repetition and the individuality of overlooked forms.
Across its three wings, Collect 2026 affirms that contemporary textiles are neither nostalgic nor peripheral. They sit confidently at the centre of craft discourse — tactile, conceptually rigorous and very much alive — offering collectors and textile enthusiasts alike the opportunity to encounter, acquire and reflect on some of the most compelling cloth-based practices at work today.
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Further Information:
Tickets for the Collect Art Fair 2026 are available now:
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Image Credits:
Lead: Kamilah Ahmed, Midnight Orchid, 2022. Silk yarns, cotton organdie, cotton and viscose embroidery. Photo Matt Hass
All images courtesy of Collect Art Fair 2026.