Touchlines: The Delicate Boundaries of Care and Cloth

This May, Sunny Bank Mills in Farsley, Yorkshire, hosts the 62 Group of Textile Artists' 2026 exhibition: Touchlines: The Delicate Boundaries of Care and Cloth. Developed in collaboration with Anna Turzynski, the Mills' Arts Director, the theme draws on the site's industrial and cultural history to explore threshold spaces — those moments where contact is felt, withheld, or transformed.

Ealish Wilson, Gossamer Layers  

Each year the group responds to a new brief, and this year's is rooted in the specifics of place. The exhibition draws parallels between textile labour, sporting cultures, and human relationships, asking how boundaries shape intimacy, care, and collective identity. The touchline of the title is borrowed from sport — the edge of the pitch, the line between participant and witness — but across these material-led and process-driven works it opens into something wider where cloth emerges as a site for emotional and social histories.

Helen Yardley, Lineout.

Among the artists exhibiting, Debbie Lyddon's The Breath of the Moon traces the contours of a semidiurnal tide across a single lunar day, marking an unstable boundary as a living touchline. Heather Belcher's Instructions for Knitting considers cloth-making as an act of care — one in which edges may be cut away and the idea of a fixed self is permitted to loosen. Helen Yardley's Lineout responds to the theme through the energy of rugby, with felted wool, echoing the physical pressure that defines the game. Hannah White's Woven Touchlines uses soft stainless steel threads to form a conductive woven network within the cloth, transforming touch into material structure...

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Image Credits:

Lead: Debbie Lydon, The Breath of the Moon. For Touchlines, Debbie has traced the contours of a semidiurnal tide across a single lunar day, marking this unstable boundary as a living touchline.

All further images courtesy of The 62 Group, and as credited in captions.