Soft Power: Lives Told Through Textile Art

SOFT POWER: LIVES TOLD THROUGH TEXTILE ART

Textile Society Full Day Event: Curators’ Tour and Colloquium

Saturday 17 May 2025

The Textile Society invites delegates to join Soft Power Curators Lesley Millar and Alice Kettle for a morning tour on the first day of this compelling exhibition of contemporary textiles. This will be followed by an afternoon Colloquium with the Curators plus some of the exhibiting International Artists, several of whom will have travelled from abroad to be present at the Opening and will return home after the Textile Society Colloquium.

The exhibition Soft Power has evolved from the ideas underpinning the book: Reading the thread: cloth and communication, published In January of this year (2025) edited by Lesley Millar and Alice Kettle. As with the book, the exhibition brings together a collection of global voices, in this case to highlight and celebrate the soft power of textiles.

The artworks focus on storytelling. They bring to light personal and collective experiences, from the autobiographical and hidden struggles of marginalised individuals to stories shaped by major events like the pandemic.

The works share intimate and emotional portrayals of self-expression while making bold statements about empowerment and change. They highlight how cloth can connect women across cultures, recording and reflecting their experiences.

This event offers the possibilities of discussion and exchange of ideas and views, about the works and about the subjects covered within the exhibition. We hope you will be able to join us, and we look forward to meeting you there.

Exhibiting artists:

Anurita Chandola, Mona Craven, Rachel Fallon, Sarah-Joy Ford, Enam Gbewonyo, Shelly Goldsmith, Pippa Hetherington, Kani Kamil, Sabine Kaner, Alice Kettle, Reiko Koga, Phillipa Lawrence, Lise Bjorne Linnert, Susie MacMurray, Alice Maher, Suzumi Noda, Jane Poulton, Margaret Nicholson, Paula Reason, Erin M Riley, Lasmin Salmon, Amneh Shaikh-Farooqui, Ellen Sharples, Kari Steihaug, Maryam Wahid, Audrey Walker.

Programme:

10.45am Registration

11.00am Welcome and morning coffee/tea in the Youngwood Room of the RWA Bristol.

11.30am Curators’ tour of the Soft Power galleries with Lesley Millar and Alice Kettle.

Approx.12.30 LUNCH (Delegates are advised to bring their own lunch or purchase refreshments at the Spice and Cole cafe at the RWA).

Transfer to Victoria Methodist Church (next door to the RWA Bristol), 1A Whiteladies Road, Bristol BS8 1NU

1.30pm Colloquium and presentations with the Curators and selected International Artists.

Afternoon Tea/Coffee

Close: 4.00pm

Ticket prices include:

Entry to the RWA Bristol.

Full day programme of Curators’ morning tours, artists’ presentations and afternoon colloquium.

Morning and afternoon refreshments (Please note that lunch is not included).

Profiles:

Alice Kettle is a contemporary textile/fibre artist in the United Kingdom. She is Professor in Textile Arts at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. Alice’s work is represented in various international public collections. Her major exhibition Thread Bearing Witness 2019 at the Whitworth Art Gallery used stitch to address issues of migration and people displacement. She has co-edited various publications including Collaboration through Craft (Bloomsbury, 2014); and The Erotic Cloth (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Reading the Thread (Bloomsbury 2025) both with Professor Lesley Millar.

Lesley Millar is Professor Emerita of Textile Culture at the University for the Creative Arts, having previously been Director of the International Textile Research Centre at the University. She has been responsible for many international textile exhibitions since 1996 including Textural Space (2001), 21:21 – the textile vision of Reiko Sudo and NUNO (2005-7), Cloth & Culture NOW (2008), Lost in Lace (2011), Cloth & Memory {2} (2013), Here & Now: contemporary tapestry (2016-17), Weaving New Worlds (2018) and, with Alice Kettle, Fabric: touch and identity (2020). Lesley writes regularly about textile practice including co-editing, with Alice Kettle, the books Erotic Cloth (Bloomsbury 2018) and Reading the Thread (Bloomsbury 2025)

Exhibiting International Artists taking part in this Textile Society event will include, but are not confined to:

Lise Bjorne Linnert

From Norway, Lise is internationally renowned for her powerful, over 8,500 hand embroidered, name-tag installation Desconacida: Unknown concerning the disappeared and murdered women from Juárez, Mexico. Her work in this exhibition again looks at power, or lack of it, this time from a very personal view point.

Pippa Hetherington

A South African artist, Pippa Hetherington addresses post-colonial identity and fragments of separated histories. By excavating collective and personal memory and working with fragmented recollection, Hetherington reflects on the pieces in history storytelling that are so often buried or erased purposefully, forcefully or conveniently. The installation exhibited in Soft Power is an outcome of working alongside embroiderers Nozeti Makhubalo, Nomonde Mtandana, Nomfundo Makhubalo, Nothandile Bopani; visual artist, Cathy Stanley; and wire artist, SiyaMaswana, who are all part of the artist collective, the Keiskamma Art Project.

Kari Steihaug

Also from Norway, Kari works with installations and found objects, with time and perishability, history and crafts as central themes. “My starting point is textiles related to everyday life, both what remained incomplete and what has been in someone’s life for a long time, used and worn. Textiles as sensuality and carriers of memory, a place to explore the relationship between remembrance and expectation, the collective and the private, and the fragile and the substantial. I am interested in highlighting the political and poetic aspects of textiles that have been in our lives for a long time”.

Shelly Goldsmith

UK textile artist who has been leading the way in combining traditional techniques with new technologies to create an archaeology of traces and memories. For Soft Power her starting point has been autoethnographic as she layers different material and technical approaches to reveal hidden stories.

Mona Craven

Born and raised in South Africa and now living in the UK, Mona Craven’s installation for Soft Power is based around a cloth embroidered in chikankari in 1860s India, which acts as a material metaphor in unravelling those cultural, national and personal in-between spaces.

Anurita Chandola

A “spacewear and textiles artist who moved to the U.K. from India with high aspirations, dreams and passion”. After a number of years in the UK she established ‘Eesh’ which is “a Himalayan-product nonprofit brand – with the purpose of empowering women artisans by promoting their traditional skills in a socially responsible way.” Her work is an intersection of space exploration with sustainable practices that have been followed for generations.

Artwork credits:

Arunita Chandola: Astro Arunita’s Spacesuit

Erin M Riley: Absence

Kari Steihaug: Seamstress in Trastevere

Lise Bjørne Linnert: Every Day

Paula Reason: Diana’s Studio

Pippa Hetherington with the Keiskamma Art Project: Cuttings

Sarah-Joy Ford: Domestic Scene in Chorlton