Bending The Line: 62 Group
Until August 19; Collins Gallery, Glasgow

Today’s savvy audiences know that textile art is about more than cosy home-spun prettiness; that it can be tough – even aggressive – in form and in content. Or that it can indeed be cosy, home-spun and pretty, but still have something uncompromisingly contemporary to say.

That’s due in part to the 62 Group, an association of textile artists founded nearly 50 years ago to push those boundaries and show the world what they were capable of. The association keeps its members under constant scrutiny, throwing them out if they rest on their laurels. They exhibit every year, the Collins Gallery currently playing host to a touring show by 50 of its members.

A debate is raging within the 62 Group about whether the term “textile artist” is too limiting; some of the work at the Collins Gallery contains no fabric at all, but metal for example, is stitched through wood. Here the spirit of textile art is invoked, while in other contributions the emphasis is more on drawing and painting, as with Paddy Killer’s evocative images on silk.

At first sight, this looks like a mixed-media show. Whereas today’s painting exhibitions, despite our obsession with innovation, often feature uniform rows of wall-mounted, rectangular works on canvas, no such modern conventions bind textile artists. There are, however, particular associations which will always form a part of this art’s narrative.

It will forever invoke, for example, memories of women’s domestic chores. Caren Garfen’s patchworked bed set contains between its bright candy stripes a grim summary of statistics proving that despite their best intentions, men will almost always end up leaving the housework to the women.

Textile art can also provide, as Louise Bourgeois knew well, an immediate route to the body. Lucy Brown’s Legs is woven together from her own tights and her mother’s, in four baleful, dangling lengths of striped tan, pink and black. More than any double portrait, this modest work conjures up a relationship, both genetic and psychological, between mother and child.

Stitching can also be about mending. Hannah Streefkerk applies this literally in Restorations, darning artfully over the tears and erosions in photographs of the natural world. Julia Burrowes applies it therapeutically in her extraordinarily poetic mosaic of felt squares, spelling out the time it takes to recover from emotional setbacks. Like a stained glass window for grieving women, it channels personal angst ala Tracey Emin but with a subtlety for which the latter artist is not known.

The show contains works of brutal monumentality: Ann Goddard’s Arte Povera-style wooden construction and Al Johnson’s cheeky Domestic Martyr are both unforgettable. But there is, as you would expect, a greater emphasis on fragility; Jan Beaney’s landscapes from Lesbos are beautiful images, stitched and appliquéd together, of an unprepossessing scrubland in morning and evening light. The film on which they were assembled has since been dissolved, leaving each thread clinging to the next in a delicate new cloth, like a spider’s web, on the brink of dissolution.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 11.07.10