Textile art is as old as the hills, but retains its vitality in the digital age.
It would be tempting to view the current vogue for textile art as a knee-jerk reaction against digitalism and AI art by collectors and gatekeepers, always on the look-out for the next new thing. Or old thing, in this case (as Bauhaus artist Anni Albers pointed out in her seminal 1965 book On Weaving, ‘Along with cave paintings, threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning.’)
But let’s not go there: it would be more accurate to call this resurgence a conversation with computer-generated art. Obvious differences aside (you can’t smell a digital print; there’s a tactility about textiles that AI art can’t yet match) there are many interesting parallels, similarities and crossovers to consider.
After all, early computers used punch cards based on Joseph Jacquard’s revolutionary ‘Jacquard Loom’, invented in 1801. There’s something very binary about weft and warp; think about all the pattern, and repetition involved in the weaving process. And did you know that the Apollo 11 moon landing engineers employed Navaho textile artists to design the integrated circuit boards for their spacecraft?
I learnt that last nugget from Margo Selby, whose colourful woven artworks were displayed at last year’s British Art Fair by Cynthia Corbett Gallery. Selby was also shown at 2024’s Collect Craft Fair, her sixteen-metre-high tapestry Moon Landing running up the circular stairwell in Somerset House. The piece, inspired by those Navaho weavers’ work, was fashioned in collaboration with composer Helen Caddick, the complex patterns of the fabric responding to the equally complex patterns in the musical score (played on-site by a string sextet).
