Textile Artists Who Expanded What Their Medium Could Do

Morris taught himself to dye with indigo and madder when commercial chemical colours disappointed him, working at Thomas Wardle's dyeworks in Leek before setting up his own vats at Merton Abbey in 1881. That hands-on research gave his printed cottons, such as Strawberry Thief, their depth of colour. At Merton the firm also wove large tapestries, including the Holy Grail series designed with Edward Burne-Jones and woven by John Henry Dearle's team. Morris insisted textile design was serious art long before galleries agreed.

Newbery founded the embroidery department at the Glasgow School of Art in 1894 and turned needlework from a drawing-room accomplishment into a design discipline. Her style, appliqué of linen shapes outlined in stitching, stylised roses and lettering worked into collars and cushions, became a signature of the Glasgow Style alongside Mackintosh's furniture. She also argued that embroidery should be cheap enough for ordinary women to make and wear, and her pupils, including Ann Macbeth, spread that idea through schools across Britain.

Fortuny's Delphos gown, patented in 1909 and inspired by the Charioteer of Delphi, is a column of finely pleated silk so supple it can be twisted into a coil and stored in a hatbox; the exact pleating method is still debated. He developed it in his Venetian palazzo with his partner and collaborator Henriette Negrin, who is now credited with much of the design. They also invented ways of stencil-printing velvet and cotton with metallic pigments so they looked like Renaissance brocade, a technique the Fortuny factory on Giudecca still guards.

Mairet's workshop, Gospels, in Ditchling, Sussex, made hand-weaving a modern craft rather than a nostalgic one. She researched natural dyes in Sri Lanka and India and wrote the influential A Book on Vegetable Dyes in 1916, then wove experimental cloths mixing wool with cellophane, metal threads and other unusual yarns. Gospels trained generations of weavers, including apprentices from Germany and Scandinavia, and she worked with industry to bring handwoven samples into mill production. The Crafts Study Centre in Farnham holds her archive.

Delaunay's abstract painting began with a textile: a patchwork cot blanket she sewed for her baby son in 1911, its blocks of colour reminding her of Cubist painting. From there she and her husband Robert developed Simultanism, and she carried it straight onto fabric, designing printed silks for the Lyon manufacturer Bianchini-Férier and dresses from her own Paris boutique in the 1920s. Her colour-block coats, scarves and even a painted Citroën showed abstraction living on bodies and streets, not just on canvas.

Ryggen wove the news. On a farm by a Norwegian fjord she spun, dyed and wove her own wool, often without a preliminary cartoon, and used the loom to attack fascism as it happened: Ethiopia, 1935, shows Mussolini with a spear through his head, and other tapestries confront Hitler, Franco and the occupation of Norway. Her husband Hans Ryggen, a painter, appears in several works. Her large tapestry We Are Living on a Star hung in the government building hit by the 2011 Oslo bombing, survived, and became a national symbol.

Stölzl ran the Bauhaus weaving workshop from 1926, the first woman to become a Bauhaus master, and turned it from a craft class into a laboratory for industrial textiles: new synthetic yarns, sound-absorbing and light-reflecting fabrics, and patterns designed for machine production and sold under licence. Her own wall hanging Five Choirs of 1928 shows her painterly side. Many women were steered into weaving at the Bauhaus against their wishes, and Stölzl made the workshop one of the school's few commercial successes. Anni Albers was among her students.

Albers's Bauhaus diploma piece of 1930 was a wall covering for an auditorium, woven from cotton and cellophane to absorb sound and reflect light, and that practical genius ran through her career alongside abstract pictorial weavings such as Six Prayers. In 1949 she became the first textile artist given a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. Her book On Weaving is still the clearest explanation of how structure makes meaning in cloth. She taught at Black Mountain College with her husband Josef, and later turned to printmaking.

Tawney took weaving off the wall and into the air. In her Coenties Slip studio in lower Manhattan, a neighbour of Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly, she developed open-warp weavings in the early 1960s, tall narrow forms where sections of bare thread let light through, using an adapted loom and a reed she designed. Later came her Clouds, thousands of linen threads hung from a ceiling grid. The 1963 exhibition Woven Forms at New York's Museum of Contemporary Crafts helped launch the fibre art movement around her.

Asawa crocheted with wire. She learned the looped technique from basket makers in Toluca, Mexico, in 1947, while still a student at Black Mountain College, and used it to make hanging sculptures of interlocking lobes, transparent forms within forms whose shadows matter as much as the metal. Her method was textile through and through, a single continuous line looped by hand. She worked at her kitchen table while raising six children in San Francisco, and later campaigned for arts education in the city's public schools.

Abakanowicz's Abakans, huge woven forms in sisal, horsehair and rope that hang from the ceiling like dark pods, skins or wombs, broke tapestry out of its frame in the 1960s; one won the gold medal at the São Paulo Biennial in 1965. She dyed and wove the fibres herself, often from scavenged ship's rope, with assistants in her Warsaw studio. The Abakans led to her crowds of headless burlap figures, moulded on plaster casts, which carry the textile's rough skin into sculpture about anonymity and history.

Ringgold's story quilts combine painted scenes, handwritten text and pieced fabric borders, so a quilt can be read like a book. She began working in cloth in the 1970s with her mother, the fashion designer and dressmaker Willi Posey, who sewed the early pieces with her, partly because quilts were easier than canvases to roll up and ship. Tar Beach of 1988, a girl flying over a Harlem rooftop, became an award-winning children's book. She died in 2024, and the quilts remain a model of craft as autobiography and history.

De Amaral weaves light. Her large hangings from the 1970s onwards combine linen and cotton with gesso, paint and gold or silver leaf, so the surface shimmers like the gilded altars of colonial Colombian churches; the later Brumas series suspends thousands of painted threads into floating, shifting fields. She trained at Cranbrook in Michigan, then built a workshop in Bogotá with skilled weavers, many of them women, who work with her on each piece. The 2024 retrospective at the Fondation Cartier in Paris brought her to a new audience.

Hicks works at both extremes of scale. Her minimes, palm-sized weavings made on a small frame loom she carries while travelling, are like sketchbook pages in thread; at the other end are towering bundles of wrapped, brightly coloured fibre that spill across gallery floors and up walls, as in her installation for the 2017 Venice Biennale. A student of Josef Albers at Yale, she has collaborated with weavers in Mexico, Chile, India and Morocco, and designed textiles for architects including Eero Saarinen.

Bendolph is one of the best-known quilters of Gee's Bend, the small Black community in a loop of the Alabama River whose women developed an improvised, bold quilting tradition over generations, often piecing work clothes and feed sacks into asymmetric blocks and stripes. When the 2002 touring exhibition The Quilts of Gee's Bend reached the Whitney, critics compared them to modernist painting, but the makers' own terms matter more: Bendolph learned from her mother and works within a family and community practice, now continued by her daughter-in-law Louisiana Bendolph.

Boetti's Mappe are world maps in which every country is filled with its own flag, embroidered in wool on large linen sheets. He designed them from 1971 onwards but never stitched them: Afghan women embroiderers in Kabul, and later in refugee communities in Pakistan, made each one and chose many of the colours themselves, including the famously varied sea colours. As borders and flags changed between commissions, the maps became a record of world politics. They are best read as a long collaboration, not a single artist's object.

Horiuchi MacAdam's textiles are for climbing. After children clambered onto one of her crocheted gallery pieces in the 1970s, she began making vast hand-crocheted nets and pods in brightly dyed nylon for play: the rainbow net nest in its own timber pavilion at Hakone Open-Air Museum is the best known. Each one takes months of hand crochet, with her husband Charles MacAdam and the structural engineer Norihide Imagawa making sure it carries the weight of jumping children. Few textiles get used so joyfully or so hard.

Anatsui's shimmering wall hangings look like gold cloth from a distance and turn out to be thousands of flattened aluminium liquor-bottle tops, cut, folded and joined with copper wire. They draw on kente and adinkra cloth traditions of his native Ghana and on the history of the liquor trade, and because they are flexible, each installation is draped differently. A team of assistants in his Nsukka studio in Nigeria assembles the sections, and he leaves curators to choose the final folds. His Behemoth Sun filled Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2023.

Abad invented her own way to make paintings soft. Her trapunto technique stuffed and stitched painted canvases so they swell into relief, then encrusted the surface with buttons, beads, mirrors, shells and fabric scraps gathered on travels through more than 50 countries. The results range from vivid masks to large protest works about migrants and refugees. In 2004, months before she died, she covered the 55-metre Alkaff Bridge in Singapore with painted circles. A touring retrospective that opened at the Walker Art Center in 2023 restored her to view.

Vicuña's Quipus revive the knotted-cord recording system of the Andes as poetry and memorial. Long strands of unspun wool, dyed or left raw, hang from ceilings in great falling cascades; Brain Forest Quipu filled Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2022, woven through with found objects and a soundscape. She began making small precarios, assemblages of thread and debris, in Chile in the 1960s, went into exile after the 1973 coup, and has always linked cloth to land, water and the loss of Indigenous knowledge.

Cave's Soundsuits are wearable sculptures that cover the whole body, built from twigs, sequins, buttons, human hair, beaded flea-market finds and dyed raffia, and made to rustle and clatter when danced in. The first, in 1992, was a response to the police beating of Rodney King: a suit that hides race, gender and class and makes the wearer impossible to ignore. Trained in fibre art at the Kansas City Art Institute and as a dancer with Alvin Ailey, he works with a large studio team in Chicago, and the suits come alive in performance.

Shonibare uses one fabric to unpick a whole history. The bright Dutch wax prints sold as African cloth were developed by Dutch and British manufacturers imitating Indonesian batik, then sold to West African markets, and he dresses headless Victorian mannequins, ship's sails and globes in them to question who owns an identity. Nelson's Ship in a Bottle, with its wax-print sails, sat on Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth in 2010; The British Library of 2014 wraps thousands of books in the cloth. His studio team handles the tailoring and making.

Amer paints with a needle. Her canvases look at first like loose Abstract Expressionist drips, but the lines are embroidery thread, with long tangled tails left hanging over the surface, and closer up they resolve into repeated outlines of women drawn from fashion and adult magazines. Using a domestic craft associated with women's patience to reclaim images made for men is the point. Born in Cairo and based in New York, she has also made embroidered garden works and, more recently, bronze and ceramic sculpture.

Neto makes architecture out of crochet and stretch fabric. His early works were sagging nylon-tights sacks weighted with spices that scent the gallery; later came walk-in crocheted canopies and hammock environments you can lie in, built with teams of crocheters in his Rio de Janeiro studio. Since 2013 his work has drawn on a long relationship with the Huni Kuin people of the Brazilian Amazon, most visibly in A Sacred Place, the crocheted ceremonial space he made with Huni Kuin members for the 2017 Venice Biennale.