Airing 

Curated by Alison Aye

A group exhibition which invites viewers to engage with thread as both medium and metaphor. Revealing stories, textures, and tensions within the delicate, yet resilient, fibres of artistic practice.  “Airing,” carries layered significance. It speaks to the act of exposing materials to air, allowing them to freshen and breathe, while also symbolizing the unveiling of creative ideas in a public space. It represents the process of discussion, expression, and revelation, much like how textiles capture histories, narratives, and emotions. 

Georgie Bates trained as a Fine Artist, specialising in Painting, and her studio practice has been primarily Painting and Collage for many years. However, throughout her career she has been influenced, both aesthetically and politically, by the history of stitching/sewing/quilt making as a means of female artistic expression over significant periods in history. Using tiny paintings she made in response to a visit to Firenze and Arezzo in 2023, she translated the images into fabric pieces, first described as Fabric Drawings and then deciding they are Fabric Collaged Paintings. Working in fabric has enabled the work to grow up to eight feet square, a scale impossible to work on in a painting in her current home studio.

Marcia Bennett-Male describes her textile pieces as ‘art therapy’, helping her to observe how she navigates through the world as a black female. She also depicts black women from history, previously poorly documented, celebrating fantastical goddesses of myth and legend. Her influences at first were the embroidered flags of the Fante people, Ghana, Africa. Looking at the Fante style and execution gave her permission to relax from her formal embroidery training. It was also the fearless and visceral paintings of Frida Kahlo which enabled her to work on an autobiographical level. She uses African wax prints as a shorthand to underline her black heritage, juxtaposed with the English chintz style materials bought in charity shops or car boot sales, which denote the dominant white English culture that surrounds her.

Rihanata Bigey is a London-based multidisciplinary artist whose work delves into the intersections of identity, memory, history, and materiality. Born in Burkina Faso, her practice is deeply rooted in the rich cultural heritage of the African continent. Through her art, she examines how race, gender, and social structures shape perceptions of self and belonging. Her practice encompasses drawing, painting, video, weaving, printmaking, and sculpture, using materiality as a language to challenge dominant narratives and reconstruct alternative ones. A central theme in her work is the representation of Black women and how they reclaim agency in the face of systemic oppression and harmful narratives. She explores the iconographic significance of the Black female body in modern culture across both Western and African societies, examining its physical and psychological impact, exposing the tensions between imposed ideals and self-determination, and ultimately asserting the right to define one’s own identity.

Sarah Coviello is a graduate of Goldsmiths’ College and the work on display here at Tension is part of her 1989 degree show. Whilst there, she caught the attention of Margaret Hall-Townley, who included her in a group show at Alexandra Palace, celebrating the work of Goldsmiths’ alumni. Since then, she has chosen to focus on nurturing young artists, dedicating her time to teaching rather than exhibiting. However, Coviello’s work is now receiving a rare moment in the spotlight. As her art returns to public view, audiences have a unique chance to experience pieces that have remained quietly treasured for decades.

Tina Crawford works predominantly, but not solely, in textiles and free machine embroidery. She creates works using her background as a source; from identity, class, immigration, disability to motherhood. Her work has been acquired by The Science Museum, Soho House and CBRE. In 2022, she was one of the artists chosen to witness the Lying-in-State of Queen Elizabeth II, producing artwork for the Parliamentary Art Collection. 

Helen Davies is an artist based in Lancashire. Her practice is concentrated on knitting, crochet, lacemaking and embroidery – traditionally ‘feminine’ activities with a history in political and social dissent. Her work focuses on themes of politics and feminism, as well as mental health. She produces masks and costumes which highlight the ways women’s identity is focused on their bodies; while harnessing the classic ‘functional’ qualities of craft. She uses pattern and imagery in her work, such as animals and symbols, as a nod to traditional embroidery samplers and folklore.

Fiona Hingston lives and works in a small village on the edge of the Mendip Hills. Much of her work has been informed by this landscape and her intimacy to it heightens her relationship to it year on year. There is always something new to investigate, to archive and to celebrate through a methodology of collecting, making and drawing. Materiality and process are at the core of her practice. “I want a relationship with the materials I’m using, of developing personal connections that deepens my friendship and knowledge of a particular area, of trying to get the best from it so it becomes an honouring of place.”

Emily Jo Gibbs makes hand-stitched pictures predominantly working with silk organza layered on to linen. She enjoys the translucent nature of the silk and the soft colour pallet the layering creates, sewing in a meticulous way often using tiny stab stitches. She has been an artist for a long time, but she was first a maker, and her process is rooted there. Being able to make things has shaped who she is, giving her a sense of identity and self-worth as a young person. She makes work that reflects her pride in being a member of a creative community of people who make things. She is currently Artist in Residence Trinity Buoy Wharf.

Woo Jin Joo is a textile artist working predominantly with embroidery. Based in London, her practice explores her East Asian heritage through mythology, folklore and shamanism and how these ancient belief systems manifest in contemporary culture. 

S Kelly draws on her background in digital media and theatre studies, weaving a dialogue between 2D and 3D forms. She creates theatrical, painting-collages as temporary structures, which are then photographed—the resulting prints serving as records of something destined to disintegrate. She is interested in the interplay between the virtual and the material. In recent works, she has been collaborating with AI image generation software, which introduces a tension between machine logic and human intent. Whether through sculpture, print manipulation, or physical interventions on images, the work insists on a return to the tangible—a re-grounding of the digital in material space. 

Sumi Perera is a post-disciplinary academic, curator, artist who merges her medical and scientific background to create interactive installations that evolve in colour, emit light and produce sound. She obtained a MA from Camberwell College, University of Arts London in 2003-04. She has taught at Middlesex University on the MA Printmaking course and the Royal Academy’s short courses program. She exhibits, has held artist residencies and won many awards internationally: Gold Medal in Seoul, The Prix de Print USA, The Flourish Award, Scuola Venice Guest Artist Fellowship. Her work is held in many public and private collections, including the Tate Britain, Victoria & Albert Museum, British Museum, Royal Collection, British Library, Ashmolean Museum, Yale Centre for British Art USA; & museums in China, Japan, Italy, Denmark, Iraq, Egypt, Taiwan, USA & Australia. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Painters Printmakers, Society Of Designer Craftsmen, Society Of Graphic Fine Artists, The 62 Group of Textile Artists and The London Group. 

Radical Embroiderer specialises in hand embroidery and is interested in the way it can be used to highlight, question & challenge. She employs embroidery as a medium to record what is often overlooked and/or quickly forgotten. She tries to inject humour into her work and sees this as a defence mechanism against insidious behaviour; a form of armour. She is a member of Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (PCO) Society of Embroidered Works (SEW) and volunteers with Stitching Together Bristol which provides welcoming places for refugees and asylum seekers to be creative. She has lived and worked in both the U.K. and New Zealand.

S. Riley is a London-born artist whose work offers a profound exploration of self-reflection and the complexities of childhood. Through a multidisciplinary approach combining sculpture, film, and composition, Riley creates pieces that invite audiences to reconsider their own relationships with pain and growth. His practice is grounded in the belief that suffering, while unavoidable, can serve as a powerful catalyst for transformation.

Sally Spinks is concerned about the changing nature of class, consumerism and social equity. She works predominantly with the ‘cosiness’ and ‘softness’ of textiles to draw people into uncomfortable realities and challenging questions. In 2008 she gained her MFA from Goldsmiths, and is part of two prestigious groups of exhibiting textile artists – The 62 Group and Prism. As well as being a practising artist, she also produces garments for use in major feature films alongside working as a freelance Design Director. Sally lives and works in South East London.  

Sato Sugamoto is a sculptor based in London, born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She is a member of The Royal Society of Sculptors. Her work visualizes the complexity of human thought and emotion through conceptual sculptures and installations. Using colorful fibers and electrical cords, these entangled strings evoke neurological circuits symbolizing the harmony and the contradictions within our values, perceptions, and decisions.

Annie Taylor is an illustrative textile artist, lurking around folktales and revolting women, whose work was recently described as “bonkers”. Her often intricately stitched work looks at the world from a childlike point of view, trying to make sense of equality and sexual relations from within the rabbit hole.  She is a member of Prism and a founding member of The Profanity Embroidery Group. 

Wolfgang Woerner is a Queer German British mixed-media artist. His creative practice moves freely between 2 and 3 dimensions, paper and cloth, drawing and stitch, as ideas drift in the making. Touch is an essential aspect in his process of creating works. This physical contact, the handling of stuff, currently embraces discarded things including toys, restaurant napkins and hotel bedsheets both literally and as prompts in recreating and retelling the stories of all they have passed through. His work responds to the beautiful decay below the polished veneer, subjects in the midst of inner turmoil, altered realities that create places of safety and belonging, and concepts of personal and communal space and their boundaries. It reacts against the false intellectualising and editing of the past to fit an ideal.

Messua Wolff’s process begins with material encounter and the fabrication of pigment, dyes and inks from her everyday. Walking, growing, foraging, reusing are continuous actions infused in her work. Materials such as tangled silk, nylon thread, and other leftovers are repurposed alongside waste, such as onion skin for dye. In her practice, she inhabits slow temporalities structured by the colour processes, which mark, score and store time in a physical form. She is currently working on her PhD at the Royal College of Art.

Jane Wood’s process-led practice centres on the transformation of found objects. The contrast between materials evokes a visual and emotional response that stimulates the creative process. Dirt and decay linger, the objects often incomplete and brittle speak of fragility, loss and the fleeting nature of existence. Using only objects gathered to preserve their true form; materials are manipulated through a playful and intuitive process of making. Using hand construction methods, a dialogue between object and artist is formed pushing the boundaries of materials. Unique structures emerge, tactile connections between past and present, people, memory and place. Jane has a BA Fine Art from the University of Wolverhampton and MA in Multimedia Design from Liverpool John Moores. She works from her studio at Sunny Bank Mills in Farsley, Leeds.