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...

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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.