Sarah Myerscough Gallery has built its reputation on process-led art, the kind of work where the making matters as much as the made. Its new digital exhibition, Small Threads, running from 21 August to 21 September 2026, puts that commitment to an interesting test: The gallery has taken artists from its previous exhibition Thread and asked them to think in miniature.
The premise is simple but the implications are not: can weaving hold its conceptual weight and structural force when scaled right down to the intricate and the intimate? Viewed on screen, at high detail, these works invite the kind of close, contemplative looking that a gallery wall rarely demands, and more than once you find yourself wishing you could reach through the screen and touch the surface in front of you. The result argues that fibre's resonance has little to do with size.
Diana Scherer, Apical #12, 2026, Plant root textile.
Some of that argument begins underground. Diana Scherer, working with biologists, has spent years directing plant roots to grow through specially designed moulds, coaxing them into lattice structures that resemble wool or silk. Her textiles are grown rather than made, treating the hidden life of roots as a process worth bringing into the light.
Aude Franjou, Forest Nest #2, 2026. Sculpted linen, dyed in shades of green.
Aude Franjou takes a more sculptural route to the same vegetal territory. Her technique, which she calls "sculpted linen," involves wrapping flax fibre with twine in repeated, tensioned movements, until the material starts to climb and grow like rope or vine. Trained originally in Renaissance painting, she treats colour as load-bearing, layering natural and synthetic dyes to build depth into three-dimensional form.
Teresa Hastings, Shakti’s Sister (detail), 2025. Himalayan wool, felted and tie-dyed wool and washi paper, Hemp Raffia and raw black iron.
Teresa Hastings shares that interest in colour as process rather than surface. Splitting her time between London and the Indian Himalayas, she trained under Jack Lenor Larsen before returning to natural dyeing, drawing her palette from myrobalan plum, lichen and pomegranate husk. Her panels fuse Himalayan wool, washi paper and metal into fringed, tactile surfaces where colour feels closer to alchemy than decoration.
Alida Kuzemczak-Sayer, Dark Swimmer II, 2023. Ink on Japanese mulberry paper.
Amy Usdin, Field Notes 02, 2023 Cotton, wool, synthetic fibres on vintage fishing net fragments.
Other artists in the show are drawn to deconstruction and repair. Alida Kuzemczak-Sayer covers sheets of mulberry paper in graphite and ink, tears them into strips, then re-aligns them into cellular, hanging volumes, so that language is physically taken apart and reassembled as something closer to cloth. Amy Usdin works in the opposite direction, taking worn horse-fly and fishing nets and weaving new fibre through their damage, until each net becomes a psychological landscape holding grief and renewal in the same knot.
Left: Ann Coddington, Imminent, 2016. Twined linen and hand knotted netting. Right: Wanbing Huang, Ying Xu - The Waxing and Waning I, part 1, 2024. Ramie, China grass cloth and bamboo.
Lucy Williams, Umbra, 2026. Cane and flax thread.
Form and body run through the remaining three practices. Ann Coddington twines, nets and lashes fibre into shapes that recall bodies: swollen stomachs, limbs, the curve of a waist, calling on what she describes as somatic memory each time a piece is installed. Wanbing Huang, a Loewe Craft Prize finalist, works ramie, bamboo and China grass cloth into modular, repetitive forms shaped by Eastern philosophy and cosmology, attentive to how light and movement shift a piece over time. And Lucy Williams, a Brighton-based basket maker, forages flax, dog rose and pond sedge from the South Downs, rarely knowing a piece's final shape when she begins. Instead, muscle memory guides each binding into a precise, domestic form.
Small in scale, these works lose nothing of weaving's ambition.
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Further Information:
Small Threads, runs online from 21 August to 21 September 2026 on the Sarah Myerscough Gallery website.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Diana Scherer, Detail from the Apical series, 2024. Plant root textile, red mesh. Framed. 170 H x 120 W cm
All further images as credited in captions.