Olga de Amaral, Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz
For centuries, textiles have carried knowledge.
They have protected the body, marked identity, travelled between generations and preserved ways of understanding material through spinning, weaving, knotting and repetition.
But during the second half of the twentieth century, something shifted.
A generation of artists began to approach these same materials and techniques not simply as ways of producing cloth, but as a language in their own right.
Thread left the loom.
Textile moved away from the wall.
Fibre acquired volume, weight and presence.
Among the artists who transformed this field, Olga de Amaral, Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz opened radically different possibilities for what textile could become. Their practices helped establish fibre as a material capable of occupying the same territory as painting, sculpture and installation. (Fondation Cartier)
Olga de Amaral — Material and light
In the work of Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, weaving becomes almost impossible to categorise.
Since the 1960s, she has worked with linen, cotton and horsehair alongside gesso, pigments, gold leaf and palladium, weaving, knotting, braiding and layering materials into works that move between textile, surface and three-dimensional form. (Fondation Cartier)
Her work remains connected to the structure of weaving, yet continuously moves beyond it.
The landscapes of Colombia, pre-Columbian material cultures, geometry and the presence of gold enter her work without becoming literal representations. They are absorbed into another visual language.
Perhaps most compelling is her understanding of surface as something capable of creating contemplation.
Material becomes light.
Textile becomes presence.
And inherited textile knowledge becomes the starting point for something unmistakably contemporary.
Sheila Hicks — The possibilities of thread
For Sheila Hicks, fibre seems almost limitless.
After studying painting at Yale, Hicks travelled to Chile on a Fulbright scholarship to study ancient Andean weaving. She subsequently lived in Mexico and continued encountering textile cultures through extensive work and travel around the world. (The Museum of Modern Art)
These encounters became part of a practice that moves effortlessly between scales.
A work may be small enough to fit into the hand or expand into an enormous installation. Threads are wrapped, piled, twisted, woven and allowed to occupy space.
What remains constant is an intense curiosity about what fibre itself can do.
Rather than treating textile as a surface to decorate, Hicks investigates its fundamental properties: structure, colour, flexibility, tension and volume.
The material is not simply carrying the work.
The material is the work.
Magdalena Abakanowicz — Fibre and the body
Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz pushed textile into another territory entirely.
Her monumental woven forms — eventually known as Abakans — broke dramatically with the traditional idea of tapestry.
They hung freely in space.
They could be walked around.
Their rough fibres folded, opened and created shadows, giving textile an almost bodily presence.
What had traditionally been soft and functional became monumental and confronting.
Fibre became sculpture.
And textile no longer needed either the wall or the body to justify its existence.
Together, these artists helped change the position of textile within contemporary culture.
But what makes their work relevant now is not simply that they elevated a material once associated with craft into the context of art.
There is something deeper.
They demonstrated that knowledge does not have to be abandoned in order to become contemporary.
Weaving remains.
Knotting remains.
Thread remains.
The intelligence of the hand remains.
What changes is the possibility of what these things can become.
This question resonates strongly with our research at Traces of the World.
Across the territories, fibres and techniques we study, we repeatedly encounter forms of textile knowledge that have existed for generations.
The question is not how to reproduce them unchanged.
It is how to understand what they contain.
Because textile has never been only surface.
It contains material knowledge, cultural memory, repetition, time and the relationship between hand and matter.
Contemporary textile art makes these invisible dimensions visible again.
And perhaps this is why fibre feels so relevant now.
At a moment when we are reconsidering our relationship with materials, resources and the living systems behind the objects we create, textile offers another way of thinking.
One based not only on form, but on relationship.
Thread becomes structure.
Structure becomes language.
Knowledge takes another form.