© Tate
Discover artworks which incorporate used textile fragments or reference textile traditions to demonstrate the ways in which cloth holds memory
Textiles often carry personal, cultural and familial meaning. People without access to art studios or a formal art education have employed textiles found in the home as a creative medium. The Gee’s Bend quiltmakers are an intergenerational community of African American women living in the isolated hamlet of Boykin (Gee’s Bend), Alabama. Many of the quiltmakers are direct descendants of the enslaved people forced to labour at the cotton plantation established there by Joseph Gee in 1816. Though the Gee’s Bend quilts were originally made by necessity as bedspreads and blankets, the tradition has continued with new generations. In recent years the quilts have been shown in fine art museums and galleries internationally, displayed for their improvisatory compositions and resourceful use of materials.
Contemporary artists Zohra Opoku and Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín both explore the cultural significance of textiles in relation to their own heritage. Opoku’s Queens and Kings traces historical representations of power and portrayal in Ghanaian society and references Ghanaian Kente cloth (brightly coloured woven cloth, originally reserved for dressing royalty).
Her imagery is screenprinted onto a patchwork of found and stitched cloths. It shows large sacks of clothing, illustrating the textile waste sent from the global west to markets in Ghana and across west Africa. Antonio Pichilla Quiacain is influenced by the Maya culture of his grandparents, while also reflecting aspects of geometric modernist abstract painting in his woven works.
Joan Snyder, Dark Strokes Hope 1971
Between 1969 and 1972 Snyder created a series of ‘Stroke Paintings’. These feature arrays of distinct brushstrokes of various kinds and colours, in this work also including a handprint. ‘I was interested in process and I wanted to show the raw canvas... the gesso... the first layer of paint. I wanted to be able to see all those things in one painting... the anatomy of that painting, of how it evolved.’ Synder’s approach challenges us to look at painting at a slower pace, to follow the sequence of her strokes like a narrative text or a piece of music.
Gallery label, February 2024
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artworks in Inherited Threads
Lee Ufan, From Line 1978
This work belongs to a series that Lee made by tracing long lines until he used up the paint on the brush. He laid the canvas horizontally and carefully controlled his breathing during each of these slow markmaking gestures. Describing his method, Lee wrote: ‘Load the brush and draw a line. At the beginning it will appear dark and thick, then it will get gradually thinner and finally disappear ... A line must have a beginning and an end. Space appears within the passage of time, and when the process of creating space comes to an end, time also vanishes.’
Gallery label, February 2024
2/5
artworks in Inherited Threads
Giorgio Griffa, Three lines with arabesque No.111 1991
Griffa started painting simple repeated signs on unstretched canvases in 1967. He was interested in the material qualities of painting and intentionally left folds in his canvases to stress their physical presence. His sequences of marks are always left interrupted, in a way that suggests their natural continuation. ‘I liked to preserve this sense of fragmentation, of something provisional, something that... makes no claim to represent [the world] definitively or entirely.’ In the early 1990s Griffa also began to include numbers in his work, as a different kind of abstraction from reality. Here, ‘111’ indicates the work’s order within this series of paintings.
Gallery label, February 2024
3/5
artworks in Inherited Threads
Jacqueline Humphries, ~?j.h% 2018
This work derives from a photograph Humphries scanned of one of her earlier paintings and turned into digital code using seven characters: ~, ?, j, J, H, h and %. She then made this code into a stencil, produced from a laser-cut sheet of rubber, which she used to create ~?j.h%. She applied a layer of black oil paint through the stencil, then a layer of red, moving the stencil between applications. She painted over these rows of computer-generated characters in long diagonal brushstrokes and areas of thick white paint. The result is a mix of mechanical translations and direct physical gestures.
Gallery label, February 2024
4/5
artworks in Inherited Threads
Niki de Saint Phalle, Shooting Picture 1961
To make her Shooting Pictures, Saint Phalle filled polythene bags with paint and enclosed them within layers of plaster and chicken wire that created a textured white surface. She invited spectators to shoot at these constructions, releasing the paint. Saint Phalle considered these shootings to be performances, or ‘happenings’, which she saw as integral parts of the work just as much as the finished product. This one was shot by North American artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Saint Phalle stopped making these works in 1970, explaining ‘I had become addicted to shooting, like one becomes addicted to a drug’.
Gallery label, February 2024
5/5
artworks in Inherited Threads
Art in this room
Joan Snyder
Dark Strokes Hope
1971
Lee Ufan
From Line
1978
Giorgio Griffa
Three lines with arabesque No.111
1991
Jacqueline Humphries
~?j.h%
2018
Niki de Saint Phalle
Shooting Picture
1961