London Craft Week: The Presence of Embroidery
Embroidery has often been framed as a decorative discipline within design discourse, even as it has maintained a continuous presence across fashion, craft and textile art. At London Craft Week this year, it appears across the programme with a confidence that suggests a broader and more enduring relevance.
For Selvedge, this raises a simple question: where, and in what forms, does embroidery surface across the week, and what does that reveal about its place within contemporary craft? Looking through the programme, stitch moves between institutions, studios and exhibitions, taking on different meanings in each setting. This is not a comprehensive guide, but a starting point and a way into a longer journey of discovery across London Craft Week through the lens of embroidery.
Goldwork detail by Hand & Lock, where raised padding, couched threads and metallic cord create richly textured ceremonial embroidery.
Hand & Lock makes one aspect of that persistence visible. The studio has been teaching goldwork since the eighteenth century, passing on techniques that have changed very little. During London Craft Week, this knowledge is opened up through studio access and workshops, including the Spring Leaves taster, where participants are introduced to handling metallic threads through a focused design. A parallel event with the National Army Museum places this work within a longer history, connecting contemporary practice to military and ceremonial embroidery. Here, embroidery is sustained not as artefact, but through use.
Second Revolution Khayyamiyya, Textile Panel, 2011-2012. This large cotton appliqué textile (or khayyamiyya) was made in secret at his home, as a personal reaction to the events of the Tahrir Square revolution in 2011.
At the Victoria and Albert Museum, Hany Abd El-Kader’s khayamiyya introduces a different kind of continuity. This form of Egyptian appliqué developed in Cairo’s tentmakers’ district, where large ceremonial textiles were made for public and religious life. Its geometry carries meaning shaped over generations. Abd El-Kader works within that tradition while also responding to the present, with panels reflecting political upheaval alongside more established forms. The coexistence of the two suggests that embroidery adapts to the conditions in which it is practised.
Installation view of 'Thread' at Sarah Myerscough Gallery
At Sarah Myerscough Gallery, the exhibition Thread shifts the focus again, positioning embroidery within a broader field of contemporary textile practice. Bringing together artists working with fibre, stitch and form, it treats thread as both material and method. Works emphasise process (repetition, accumulation and physical engagement) as central to meaning.
Portrait of embroidery artist, Alice kettle. Photo: Vicky Polak
Alice Kettle’s work reflects this approach. Known for large-scale figurative textiles, she uses machine stitch as a form of drawing, building images through dense layers of thread. Her compositions draw on personal experience and narrative, with surfaces that invite both distance and close attention. Time is embedded within the work, each line part of an accumulated whole shaped through sustained engagement with stitch, a process reflected in her involvement in the exhibition Illuminating Worlds: Light as Storytelling at ClothShop by Christopher Farr Cloth.
Straw goldwork samples by Hanny Newton.
Hanny Newton offers another perspective on inheritance. Trained in goldwork — including as a tutor at Hand & Lock — she now works with wheat and rye straw, described as natural gold. Shaped by harvest and climate, the material introduces variation and unpredictability, requiring a more responsive approach to stitch. Her practice extends the language of goldwork rather than replacing it, opening it out to new possibilities. Newton’s work, reflecting a balance between tradition and quiet innovation, also featured in Selvedge Issue 130: Flower, will be on show as part of Future Icons Selects.
The Friday Sari Project brings a further dimension, highlighting how embroidery moves across cultures and contexts. Presenting designers from India and Sri Lanka, it foregrounds practices rooted in regional techniques and materials. Here, embroidery is both preserved and translated into new forms, markets and narratives, operating within a global framework shaped by movement between places and audiences.
Across the programme, a broader picture forms of embroidery as a practice sustained through change. Its presence at London Craft Week is not defined by preservation alone, but by its capacity to move between contexts — from workshop to gallery, from heritage technique to contemporary application — while retaining its core structure of labour, skill and material attention.
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Further Information:
London Craft Week takes place throughout the city from 11 - 17 May 2026.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Alice Kettle, Queen Anne, 2021, Thread on linen mix
All further images as credited in captions and courtesy of London Craft Week