The group exhibition "Thread Count" ranges in scale from delicate miniatures to immersive large-scale installations to examine the concepts, questions and uses of soft sculpture

Left to right: Freddie Robins, It’s all the same (2019); Mikey Cuddihy, Taffeta Skirt (2023); Andrew Omoding, Lookea, Happy Goat (2024); Rebecca Riess, Abject Cutie (2024); Sophie Giller, Who is she, Challen (2021); Julie Cockburn, The Horticulturalist (2021), Queen of Diamonds (2024)

By JOSH MCLOUGHLIN September 20, 2024

Imagine a sculpture. What do you see? Michelangelo’s immovable David, perhaps, or one of Henry Moore’s semi-abstract bronze monoliths? Maybe you think of Barbara Hepworth’s Mother and Child, modest in scale yet carved from Ancaster stone, or the 650-kilogram cast-iron figures of Anthony Gormley’s Another Place? All these sculptures have something in common: they are solid, dense, rigid. Forty-five years after Rosalind Krauss said ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ is ‘no longer organised around the definition of a given medium on the grounds of material’, we still associate sculpture with the hard matter of stone, clay, metal, and plaster.

In the last decade or so, however, artists working outside these canonical materials, along with curators and scholars revising the history of the form, have unsettled the primacy of hardness in sculpture. Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present (2015) at ICA Boston showcased ‘fiber art’ in the 1970s and 1980s, including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sheila Hicks, Lenore Tawney, Claire Zeisler and Eva Hesse. In 2019, Tate Modern hosted the first major exhibition of Annie Albers’s weavings and hangings and the Hayward Gallery’s retrospective The Woven Child focussed on Louise Bourgeois’s use of fabric and textiles. Critics such as Clare Hunter and Elissa Auther have built on Rozsika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch (1984, republished 2010), which examined the ‘art/craft hierarchy’ and the assumption that ‘art made with thread and art made with paint’ or hard materials ‘are intrinsically unequal’.

Left to right: Sophie Giller, Ceramic Knit Works, selection from series (2023) To be in a soft space (2024), Each line to be different (2024)
 

Thread Count at The Art Station (Suffolk, UK) ‘tramples over those preconceptions, evidencing the hard resolve of the soft discipline’. A two-part show co-curated by Freddie Robins, artist and professor of textiles (Royal College of Art, London), Clare Palmier (artist and director), and Emily Cannell (artist and programme manager), Thread Count ranges in scale from delicate miniatures to immersive large-scale installations to examine the concepts, questions and uses of soft sculpture, from ‘the exploration of the world of pure form’ (as Moore put it) to the frayed and messy seams of history.

Walking into the space, you meet Robins’s It’s all the same, a life-sized line of knitted paper dolls gently hovering in the gallery space, acting out an uncertain and eerie frozen drama. The peachy colours and delicate material are suspended in tension with the foreboding and melancholy affect of this sagging, deflated troupe. Robins’s other work here, hanging in the vault of the Old Bank, is also charged with affects: Courage puts ‘rage’ back into ‘courage’, subverting knitting’s comfort and cosiness in the process.

Daisy Collingridge, Burt and Dave heads (nd)

Sophie Giller’s three wall-hung Piano Blankets are patchworked from vintage wool and nylon, with wooden frames moulded from grand pianos her father was restoring. These blankets, once a staple of ordinary domestic life, are stitched into painterly compositions and raised in status, so the humble and humdrum become sublime, treated with the dignity and precision of paintings. Giller’s Ceramic Knit works – lumpy, oblong ceramic portals, encircling homespun wool and weavings – overturn the structure of painting by making the frame itself a form of expanded painting and replacing the pictorial subject with a ‘craft’ process.

The back room is populated by Daisy Collingridge’s uncanny cast of bulbous bodies and floating heads, anatomising the spilling, sinuous human form in flesh and fabric. Collingridge’s work puts what’s inside outside, bringing viscera to the surface. These figures are unnerved and unnerving, with their pastel colours and soft jersey fabrics that bulge and brim with body politics.

Foreground left to right: Woo Jin Joo, Thoroughly Odd (2023), A Long Long Time Ago (2022); background left to right: John Craske, Rescue from Breeches Buoy (c.1930), Lifeboat (c.1930); Abigail Lane, Seer (2022), Zig Zag Lady (Spiral Milk) (2022); Woo Jin Joo, Glove Dokkaebi (2022)

The floor stages a scene crowded with colour, texture, and shape. Woo Jin Joo’s textile creatures, based on East Asian and Korean mythology, are dressed in found clothes and hats, yet they retain a mystical and supernatural air, with fantastic bodies, regal colours, and hanging tassels. They are joined by Andrew Omoding’s herd of goat-like sculptures, bound, stitched and wrapped together from found objects, their coiled postures and skeletal frames drawing strange beauty from an eccentric, chaotic mix of materials and fibres.

Feifan Hu’s performance work Towelling explores the deep connections between textiles, youth and memory, and the pejorative assumptions around ‘domestic’ work, ‘childish’ creativity and the feminine associations of ‘craft’. Abigail Lane’s surreal diorama Zig-Zag Lady (Spiral Milk) riffs on Robert Harbin’s famous magic trick – ‘cutting’ his assistant into three pieces – with a fragmented tableau exploring fetishism, sexuality, and mind-body dualism by way of dismemberment and embroidery. William Wallace’s bridle, with its intricate stitching and leatherwork (a handmade ready-made, as it were) reminds us of the enduring relationship between textiles, bodies, transportation and industry. Another piece combining metal and textiles is Peter Collingwood’s (1922–2008) Macrogauze 306, loaned from a private collection. A hypnotic ziggurat of thread attached to steel rods, this work deconstructs the process of weaving to make fine art from a historical manufacturing process.
 

Foreground left to right: Andrew Omoding, Lornee, Big Goat (2024), Lookea, Happy Goat (2024), Young One, Baby Goat (2024); background left to right: Mikey Cuddihy, Ulla’s Apron, (1,080 squares) (2023), Taffeta Skirt (2023)
 

Annabel Elgar’s stitched and embroidered vignettes, made during the first UK Covid-19 lockdown, piece together meaning in a world exceeding all reference. The women in these scenes are suffused with sadness and frustration and haunted by dark, avian symbolism, mirroring the helplessness of Elgar’s puppet sculptures on the shelf below.

Several artists have used screen media to powerful effect. In Srinivas Surti’s Stance Remix #2, an anti-hero playfully echoes the Artemision Bronze but remixes classical sculpture with the radically modern materiality of a 1980s shellsuit. Jevan Watkins Jones’s film Red Thread explores the artist’s last meeting with his late brother through the vision of a single thread caught in the air vent of a train carriage during a journey from Briançon to Paris, whilst Emily Cannell’s Soft, brutal and Shimmering Buttress are mesmerising ‘textile interventions’, shown here on film, in which the flow and drape of elegant fabrics intrude ambiguously in hard, harsh, brutalist environments. These transient, large-scale outdoor pieces counterpose the concrete wartime defence structures of eastern England with the soft flexibility of textiles.

Julie Cockburn’s framed collages present striking contrasts of colour and composition, combining elements and gestures of embroidery, screen printing and portraiture to explore images of femininity, whereas John Craske’s (1881–1943) embroidered landscapes record his life as a fisherman on the North Norfolk coast, as well as scenes from British history; both show how textiles match the narrative, pictorial and representational power of painting. Mikey Cuddihy’s Ulla’s Apron, with 1,080 painted gingham squares, recalls her sewing lessons as a child, threading together nostalgia and autobiography to recreate a lost domestic world of women’s work, kitchen textiles and mother–child memories.

Left to right: Rebecca Riess, The Drag (shapeshifter series) (2024), Shapeshifter large (shapeshifter series) (2024); Freddie Robins, Dis-com-fort (2021); Daisy Collingridge, Unknown (2022); Woo Jin Joo, The Less You Know, The Better You Will Sleep (2023); Rosie Edwards, Lurker (2024); Freddie Robins, D-ANGER (2023); Sophie Giller, Stay a while (2024), Things that aren’t there anymore (2024)

Rosie Edwards’s minimalist homespun armatures employ grids, nets and other near-geometric structures. Warden is a crumbling yet fluffy, feathery, fabric fence panel, which plays on the insecurity of barriers, walls, and façades. This soft wall hanging contrasts with Rebecca Riess’s disturbing, life-like assemblages such as Abject Cutie, is akin to a tentacled sea monster made from inflated, overstitched bin bags that act unexpectedly, contrastingly like fabrics, giving this most profane of materials strength, form and life.

Thread Count Part 2 features sculpture by Omoding, Collingridge, Edwards, Elgar, Riess and Joo a host of preternatural textile lifeforms stalking the stage and edges of The Old Theatre in Framlingham, while Robins’s DIS-COM-FORT and D-ANGER also unsettle the boundary of text, knitting, and the natural world.

Left to right: Annabel Elgar, Untitled #5 (2022), Week Two (2021), Untitled #4 (2022); Daisy Collingridge, Rosemary (2022); Annabel Elgar, Untitled #7 (2022), Week Six, 2020 Lockdown (2020), Untitled #6 (2022); Rebecca Riess, The Drag (shapeshifter series) 2024

The main space, however, is filled, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling, by Giller’s large-scale, site-specific work in several parts: Things that aren’t there anymore, Stay awhile and How things look, created by screenprinting and patchworking images of outdated ephemera from the 1990s and 2000s: Gameboys, Playstation 1s and boomboxes; hair gel, alarm clocks, Furbies and handwritten school books; shopping bags from Somerfield, Safeway and Debenhams; landline telephones and Nokia 3310s. Gathering once-common, now ghostly and superseded remnants to dramatise a lost history of (and backdrop to) everyday life, these facsimiles conjure and inhabit a strange temporality. Recently ‘new’ yet obsolete today, they have outgrown their function or been outstripped by newer models or changing tastes. Giller thus renders the ambiguous slippage between present and past, contemporaneity and history, and the accelerating rate of cultural and technological change.

The screen prints pile up fragmented, distorted and distended images, combining translucency and opacity in different ways. For instance, How things look, installed in the window, hints at the delicate illumination of stained glass, whereas Stay awhile (which visitors can sit on and touch) uses darker tones on opaque linen and images embossed in ink. Things that aren’t there anymore, two 10.5m x 5.5m hangings suspended from the ceiling (with portals to walk through), combines these textural and visual variations. Giller turns these forgotten leftovers into quotidian relics or nostalgic spectres of obsolescence whose fall from cultural cutting-edge into irrelevance invites us to contemplate our own impermanence.

Thread Count is a testament to the boundless material potential of soft sculpture. In 1971, Hepworth said: ‘The materials for sculpture are unlimited in their variety of quality, tenseness and aliveness’. The artists in Thread Count have pushed the boundaries of Krauss’s ‘expanded field’ and put Hepworth’s theory of ‘unlimited [...] variety’ into practice by using fibres to explore the deepest and most fundamental questions of life, death, and personal and social experience. In freeing soft materials from function, decoration and domesticity, Thread Count pushes the limits and conventions of ‘fine art’ and opens up new possibilities and questions for sculpture today. WM