Wednesday 30 September, 2 - 6 p.m.: Textile Day at Ruup & Form with Varuna Kollanethu and gallery artists, Closing Drinks
Ruup & Form
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7 Tilney Court, London EC1V 9BQ, United Kingdom
Ruup & Form is a contemporary London gallery working at the intersection of contemporary art, craft and design. Founded in 2019 by Varuna Kollanethu, the gallery works closely with artists to support the development of ambitious, research-driven practices through exhibitions, commissions and educational programming that foreground process, conceptual rigour and contemporary cultural discourse. With a commitment to building meaningful relationships between artists, collectors and audiences, Ruup & Form has established itself as a thoughtful platform for dialogue and exchange within contemporary practice.
Event Description
As part of London Textile Month 2026, Ruup & Form, in collaboration with Selvedge Magazine presents an afternoon of talks, workshops and informal discussion exploring textile within contemporary artistic practice. Bringing together gallery artists including Bridget Harvey, Woo Jin Joo, Barbara Long and others, the programme invites visitors into a series of intimate conversations centred around making, memory, tactility and transformation.
Extending beyond the exhibition space, the afternoon offers an opportunity to engage directly with artists and their practices through shared dialogue and exchange.
The event will conclude with drinks at the gallery from 5–6 pm to celebrate the close of London Textile Month 2026.
Barbara Long, Subversive Stitches
Barbara Long is a textile artist and art therapist whose work takes the most ordinary cloth in the house and gives it a great deal to say. In this talk and workshop, she shares the origins, the inspiration and the making of Kitchen Sink Dramas, a playful and pointed series built from old worn tea towels and dish cloths. Barbara darns them, overworks them and blazons them with ironic, often biting texts.
She speaks about writing and darning as acts of activism. Mending is domestic work, undervalued and largely unseen, and Barbara uses it to carry words that are anything but quiet. She also talks about her choice of red, the colour she returns to across the series, and what it holds for her.
Throughout the session there is a chance to see and handle her current works in progress. Barbara then invites you to make your own, working into cloth with needle and red wool thread and finding your own words for it. No experience is needed.
Christopher Kelly, Material Regulation/Material Encounter: What Does “Truth” Mean in a Material?
Christopher Kelly is a textile sculptor whose practice is built from raw jute, repetitive crochet and a deliberately restrained monochromatic palette. For Christopher these are not aesthetic decisions alone. The weight and roughness of jute, the rhythm of a repeated stitch and the quiet of a limited palette have become tools for navigating sensory experience and for enabling creative practice. Drawing on his lived experience as an AuDHD artist, he speaks about how a material can hold an artist steady, and about what that steadiness gives back to the work.
The talk is followed by a 15 minute tactile engagement in which the audience handles contrasting raw and processed materials. Participants are invited to question what makes a material feel truthful, considering authenticity, transformation, imperfection and the traces a material carries of its own history.
Those responses are then connected back to the body and the creative mind, asking whether our relationship with materials can influence how we think, feel and create. Material Regulation offers a personal perspective on contemporary textile practice, and on material choice as a form of regulation, communication and self-understanding.
Bridget Harvey, The Art of Wrapping
In this talk and workshop, artist and repair-maker Bridget Harvey explores wrapping as one of the oldest and most tender of human gestures. Drawing on research into ancient wrapping practices, protective bundles and talismans, Bridget considers what it means to bind, to hold and to keep, and why this simple act has carried meaning across so many cultures and centuries.
Bridget’s practice is grounded in repair and in the value of what is already to hand. Here she turns to found and gathered materials, twigs, stones, scraps of cloth and lengths of thread, showing how beauty and significance can be built through the quiet repetition of winding and binding.
Alongside the talk, Bridget leads a practical wrapping session. Working with the materials provided, and with any small found object you wish to bring, you make your own wrapped piece to take home, a keepsake of the afternoon.
Katerina Knight, Growing, Gathering and Making
Katerina Knight is an English textile artist and writer who brings together horticulture and textile craft. In 2021 she left the fashion industry to pursue a slow art practice, rooted in working alongside nature and aligned with the true seasons. She creates handmade embroidered works of art using flowers she cultivates herself in Malvern, Worcestershire.
On 1 October, the day after Textile Day, Katerina’s debut book Stitching with Nature is published by Batsford. From sowing seeds to sewing stitches, she shares an insight into the process of writing a book, and how over the course of one year it came together harmoniously with the rhythms and cycles of nature, growing, gathering and making. Through words, photography and making, Katerina brought the essence of her practice together on paper. She talks about the journey of creating the book and the ways in which the changing seasons shaped both its content and its process. Copies will be available to preview.
Katerina will lead a gentle, practical exercise that promises to be both soothing and sensorial. You are introduced to one of the techniques from the book, learning how lavender can be used just like a bead or sequin. You then make a small keepsake to take home as a lasting memory of the afternoon.
Woo Jin Joo, Bodily Inbetweenness Artist Walkthrough (Pre-recorded)
Woo Jin Joo’s solo exhibition Bodily Inbetweenness is on display at Ruup & Form. As she is away during Textile Month, Woo Jin has made a walkthrough of the exhibition for this afternoon, accompanied by a curatorial introduction from Varuna.
The exhibition explores the permeability of the internal and the external world. Woo Jin’s innate world is layered onto the gallery space, transforming it into a new landscape of creatures and forms. At times bestial and at times gentle, the internal world is a land of unpredictability.
In the walkthrough Woo Jin outlines her ongoing inspirations, her processes and the artworks on display, providing a deep dive into the themes of the exhibition and into the artist’s mind. She shares how she materialises these internal images and, in return, how the gallery space and the physical world inform her imagination. The presentation closes the afternoon, with the works themselves in the room, and leads into drinks.
Event Cancellation Policy
All bookings are non-refundable. However, if you let us know that you are unable to attend an event you have booked at least two weeks before the event, we will open up your place. If we find another participant, you will be offered a credit note.
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