Material Meaning
Textile Art is broadly understood to include art made with textiles, as well as art made about textiles. Rather than a domestic function, Textile Art occupies the gallery or acts as a site-specific installation and comments on the meaning of textiles. In Britain and Australia, Textile Art from the past decade has tended to explore highly conceptual agendas. This trend has caused a move away from working with the textile as a material to an exploration of themes related to the textile. The rhythms of hand and machine production, for example, appear in film and video art and the fragility of the textile is captured by artists working with sturdier substances such as metal and stone. In this essay, I propose an exploration of what I see as emerging evidence of what could be termed Textile Art from a range of artists on the African continent. I aim to consider how helpful it is to approach this work through the values of Textile Art, acknowledging the ironic danger of applying what is essentially a British genre to art emerging from independent and discrete cultures. ...
Material Meaning, Wasafiri, Vol. 25, No. 3 September 2010, pp. 38-46.