The Unbound Potential of Thread: Textile Works at Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2023

The political power and intimate resonance of textile is explored at Frieze Masters and Frieze London, 11–15 October in The Regent’s Park. The medium reveals itself as a space for play, experimentation, association and challenge, inhabited by Helina Metaferia, Maria Lai, Franca Maranò, Gala Berger, Santiago Yahuarcani, Qualeasha Wood, Nengi Omuku, Zoë Buckman, Mary Kelly, Peter Collingwood, Simone Prouvé and Mark Corfield-Moore. For these artists, threads weave, knot, fray and unravel history, memory and feeling. Here are some of their innovative approaches.

Addis Fine Art’s Frieze London booth marks the first time that research-orientated artist Helina Metaferia has exhibited in London. Metaferia has collaborated with the Brixton-based Black Cultural Archives (BCA) to incorporate archival material into her latest series of tapestries through silk screen printing. The artist combines yarn, acrylic and rope to question how systemic oppression informs personal experiences and interpersonal relationships.

H33 at Frieze London and on Frieze Viewing Room.

Thread is masterfully unfurled by Maria Lai in M77’s space at Frieze Masters. ‘Stretching out the Infinite’ reveals the Sardinian artist’s revolutionary approach to textile, unveiling key works from the 1960s–70s for the first time. Lai devoted her practice to interrogating and expanding the linguistic potential of thread: not only did she challenge its sociopolitical charge, dismantling the medium’s framing as a ‘feminine’ practice, she developed it as a personal means of writing. This is perhaps most explicit in Lai’s Autobiografie (Autobiographies) (1979). Lai’s writing may be illegible, but this intimate window offers a story we can share, following the thread as it tangles, tautens and releases. 

MW2 at Frieze Masters and on Frieze Viewing Room.

Franca Maranò was Lai’s contemporary, working in southern Italy, where she founded the first avant-garde gallery and exhibited Lai’s work. Deeply anti-conformist, Maranò challenged conventions of textiles, ceramics and painting. Richard Saltoun includes two textile pieces in its solo booth at Frieze Masters, in which Maranò works with medieval canvas. In Untitled (1976), Maranò’s sewn black lines pull away from the column of orange fabric, simultaneously suggesting freedom and vulnerability. 

S1 at Frieze Masters and on Frieze Viewing Room.

Also at Frieze Masters, Paul Hughes Fine Arts and Galeria MaPa collaborate on a vibrant selection of Pre-Columbian textiles, including mantles woven from camelid fibres, dyed in deep and luminous colours, and Huari Culture tunics composed of hundreds of feathers. These textile works are presented alongside the paintings of Brazilian modernist Loio Persio, prompting a visual dialogue spanning 4,000 years and emphasizing the direct influence of these textiles on modern and contemporary artists.

G11 at Frieze Masters and on Frieze Viewing Room.

Crisis’s debut presentation at Frieze London spotlights textile work by Gala Berger and Santiago Yahuarcani. Both artists use the medium to challenge a colonial reading of history and position narratives that have been historically silenced at the centre of their discourse. Berger denounces the extractivist policies of the West against indigenous peoples, taking textile pieces made by women in indigenous communities and overlaying digitally printed appliqués of Pre-Columbian museum objects. Yahuarcani works with the textile llanchama (derived from tree bark by the Huitoto people, the Amazonian culture in which the artist was born and lives) to depict a mythological world and the treatment of indigenous peoples of the Amazon by Westerners. 

H2 at Frieze London and on Frieze Viewing Room.

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery presents boundary-pushing approaches to textile at Frieze London. Wool is ‘tufted’ in Qualeasha Wood’s Lessons in Anatomy (2023), which explores the role of trauma in memory, using cartoon-like figures to recall the racist caricatures that populated television programmes from the mid- 20th century. Tumble dryer lint is compressed to form a fabric for Mary Kelly’s Circa 1940 (2016), lending a softness to the image that points to its fallibility: the iconic photograph reproduced is of London’s Holland House Library in the aftermath of a World War II bombing raid, an image that was likely manufactured for propaganda purposes.

The tightly woven Aso-oke fabric sanyan, crafted by the Yoruba people, bears Nengi Omuku’s All the World (2023), the texture imbuing the scene with an otherworldly quality, the figures’ faces and limbs hazy and mottled through layers of oil paint. Vintage fabrics are reused by Zoë Buckman in her latest series of textile works, which have a distinct photographic quality: in both perhaps it’s you (2023) and somewhere i swear i can hear the siren of a kettle boil (2023), the artist and her daughter’s gaze is unfalteringly direct. 

G19 at Frieze London and on Frieze Viewing Room. 

Peter Collingwood and Simone Prouvé, exhibited by Rose Uniacke at Frieze Masters, both pioneer new approaches to textiles. Collingwood plays with translucency and semi-translucency, devising his ‘macrogauzes’ in the 1960s, using a loom of his own design, which enabled him to disrupt the traditional parallel warp of threads and insert intervals in the structure of the weave.

Ethereally suspended in conversation are Prouvé’s luminescent hangings. In creating her Panneaux, Prouvé explores the irregular behaviours of different textiles – the way they reflect and absorb light – and chooses to work with stainless steel and synthetic threads such as Kelvar, commonly used for helmets and bulletproof vests. Prouvé’s mesmeric Panneaux are caught between this industrial materiality and the delicacy with which she works the threads. 

F12 at Frieze Masters and on Frieze Viewing Room.

Mark Corfield-Moore’s textile work Gilded (2023) features in the Outset Contemporary Art Fund’s artist takeover of the entrance corridor to Frieze London. Based on ikat, Corfield-Moore’s technique uses warp threads that have been directly painted. When the threads are wound on to the loom, the image distorts and destabilizes, allowing the artist to interrogate the intersection between collective and personal history and memory. Corfield-Moore’s work has just been selected by the inaugural Arts Council Collection Acquisitions Fund to be included in their national shared collection of modern and contemporary art. 

Entrance corridor, Frieze London.

More Information

Frieze Masters and Frieze London take place concurrently from 11-15 October 2023 in The Regent’s Park, London.

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_{Main Image: Nengi Omuku, Repose, 2022. Oil on sanyan, 218 × 213 cm. Courtesy the artist and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery}