Mabelmade: Mabel Johnson at the Haw Contemporary

Mabel Johnson started sewing at her mother's side, watching curtains and old bedsheets become something unrecognisable from what they had been. That practice of salvage and reinvention has never really left her work. Mabelmade, her exhibition at the Haw Contemporary, fills the entire first floor of the gallery with over twenty-five garments and patchwork pieces that feel continuous with that origin — not nostalgically, but in the way that a genuine method persists.

Mabel Johnson, (Mabelmade), Hourglass, 2026. 

The techniques are demanding ones: hand pleating, embroidery, piecing, the patient incorporation of repurposed cloth. Johnson works from the fabric outward, reading its weight and drape before committing to a silhouette. Colour follows. Composition follows that. It is a process more akin to responsive making than design in any conventional sense, and the garments register this. They have the quality of things discovered rather than resolved...

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Image Credits:

Lead: A Dress for Lulu Dress, Mabel Johnson (Mabelmade).

All further images as credited in photo captions.