Angel of Anarchy

1936–40, Eileen Agar

The blindfolded Angel of Anarchy is loosely based on an earlier painted plaster head. Agar stated that with this new work she wanted to create something ‘totally different, more astonishing, powerful ... more malign’. It suggests the foreboding and uncertainty that she felt about the future in the late 1930s. Believing that women are the true surrealists, Agar wrote: ‘the importance of the unconscious in all forms of Literature and Art establishes the dominance of a feminine type of imagination over the classical and more masculine order.’

Gallery label, October 2016

In Grey and Pink

1966, Olga de Amaral

In Grey and Pink 1966 is a long hung tapestry, with a complex woven structure, executed in muted shades of grey, brown and two shades of pink. Its forms alternate between single and grouped yarn ‘braids’, and woven sections incorporating woven geometric forms or woven strips, often superimposed on a woven ground. Born in Bogotá, Colombia, de Amaral gained a degree in architectural design before moving to the United States to study fabric art at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan between 1954 and 1955; Cranbrook was a centre of modernist design and de Amaral focused on learning about colour in textiles.

Tapestry

1966, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi

This tapestry was woven from a collage by Paolozzi, an artist who worked across sculpture, print-making and film, incorporating imagery from popular culture and forms from industrial machinery.

Gallery label, February 2016

[no title]

1970s, Unknown woman artist, Chile

This work is one of a group of textile works in Tate’s collection by unknown Chilean female artists (Tate T14998–T15017). Known as arpilleras, which literally means ‘burlap’ in Spanish, these historic patchworks represent a popular form of artistic expression and political resistance that emerged in Latin America in the twentieth century. They were created in the 1970s by women from Chile’s most economically underprivileged population. Generally the artists remained anonymous because of the political subject matter of their work.

Nue couchée

1969–70, Dorothea Tanning

This is one of Tanning’s soft sculptures that evoke bodily forms. The artist described them as ‘living materials becoming living sculptures, their life span something like ours’. The sculptures are made out of a combination of textiles stuffed with wool and various objects. Here Tanning uses table tennis balls to create the suggestion of vertebrae protruding from the fabric. Nue couchée straddles the divide between object and being, animate and inanimate. Tanning resisted interpretations of her work focused on gender and sexuality. Instead, these soft sculptures are expressions of the artist’s imaginative fantasy world.

Gallery label, September 2024

Face to Face

1971, Huguette Caland

By making kaftans, Caland could take her artworks onto the streets of Paris. Her kaftans often depict the body, but here she shows two faces coming together. This is reversed in the head of the wooden mannequin. Inspired by the abaya, traditional Arabic dress, kaftans asserted Caland’s Lebanese identity while living in France. They came to reflect the popularity of floating androgynous clothing in high fashion. In 1979 Caland designed a line of kaftans titled ‘nour’ (‘light’ in Arabic) for the fashion designer Pierre Cardin.

Gallery label, November 2022

Homeworkers

1977, Margaret Harrison

Margaret Harrison advocated for workers’ and women’s rights. She began researching Homeworkers when the UK Equal Pay Act came into force in 1975. This was meant to stamp out separate (lower) rates of pay for women. Harrison worked with the National Campaign for Homeworkers in London for two years. She interviewed several piece workers, paid per item produced. The canvas includes items they made, their production time, the selling price and the money paid to their makers. The hands at the top symbolise the manual toil involved in piece work.

Gallery label, September 2023

Embryology

1978–80, Magdalena Abakanowicz

Embryology is a collection of objects of varying sizes, made of various rough-hewn fabrics and stuffed. When installed, the boulder-like forms are accumulated into large group environments that the viewer can walk into and around. The objects inhabit an ambiguous, disturbing place between bodies, organic matter and rock. While they appear firm and weighty, the seams and slashes in the fabric betray their softness. Their shapes are evocative of cocoon-like forms, something also suggested by the series title, Embryology. Magdalena Abakanowicz made these works to reflect on regeneration and the development of human and animal nervous systems, topics she discussed with scientists in Poland during the early 1970s. The materials and scale of this work exemplify Abakanowicz’s preoccupation with surface, texture and seriality.

Untitled (Cravings White)

1988, reconstructed 2011, Lee Bul

This is the reconstruction of a sculptural body-costume worn by the artist during her ‘Cravings’ performance at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul in 1989. Hidden microphones amplified the sound of her movements. Lee recalled that her ‘performances were a natural extension of my sculptural concerns’. She has continued to make sculptures, whose monstrous forms deconstruct ideals of the female body. In reconstructing Untitled (Cravings White) long after the original was lost in a studio flood, she reinforced the links between her sculptures and performances.

Gallery label, July 2015

Femalia

1996, Patricia Belli

Femalia is made from the fabric of a pink dress, once worn by the artist. Stretched and contorted across a canvas, it creates an abstract form. Folds and stitches in the fabric may suggest violence. During the 1990s Belli would often rework various materials, such as second-hand clothing or furniture, to suggest fragmented and dislocated bodies. Many of these works confront and question ideas of femininity, particularly within the context of Nicaragua, where she lives and works.

Gallery label, December 2020

Jauba

2000, Mrinalini Mukherjee

Jauba (Hibiscus) 2000 is a freestanding sculpture that was created by knotting yarn made from dyed hemp fibre over a vertical metal armature, with the bulk of its woven detail on the front. The yarn has been dyed red, green and black and is woven into pleated organic forms which drape the frame like a robe. ‘Jauba’ means hibiscus in the artist’s native language Bengali. Visually, the sculpture resembles a botanical, floral form, roughly symmetrical, which droops slightly towards the floor due to the weight of the material.

Weapon

2003–7, Yin Xiuzhen

Weapon 2003–7 is composed of thirty individual ‘missiles’, each one measuring almost four metres in length. Each of these is constructed from plastic drying rods and metal hoops, over which different fabrics have been stretched and knotted. At the end of every projectile protrudes the blade of a small kitchen knife. When displayed, the missiles are suspended from the ceiling with fishing wire, at various heights, with the blades pointing in the same direction.

Staircase-III

2010, Do Ho Suh

Civil Tapestry 4

2011, Theaster Gates

In May 1963, a group of black school children and students were marching peacefully for equal rights in Birmingham, Alabama. Police used powerful fire hoses to break up the march, injuring many of the young protestors. Gates has arranged strips of decommissioned fire hoses to resemble the composition of a 1960s American abstract painting – a form that pointedly failed to engage with the Civil Rights movement. Gates also questions whether the protestors’ goals have been fulfilled. ‘Some of us are slightly better while others are a great deal better’, he has reflected, ‘but… things are far from equal’.

Gallery label, November 2015

Ink Splash II

2012, El Anatsui

Ink Splash II resembles an abstract painting. However the illusion of swift, gestural brushstrokes and splashes has been created through a painstaking process of weaving flattened bottle tops together with copper wire. The artist explains, ‘the most important thing is the transformation. The fact that these media, each identifying a brand of drink, are no longer going back to serve the same role but are elements that could generate some reflection, some thinking, or just some wonder…[T]hey are removed from their accustomed, functional context into a new one, and they bring along their histories and identities.’

Gallery label, January 2016

The British Library

2014, Yinka Shonibare CBE

The British Library 2014 is an installation of 6,328 hardback books individually covered in colourful ‘Dutch wax print’ fabric and arranged on rows of shelving. Names are printed in gold leaf on the spines of 2,700 of the books, the majority of which are of first- or second-generation immigrants to Britain, both celebrated and lesser-known, who have made significant contributions to British culture and history. Among names such as Hans Holbein, Zadie Smith, Dame Helen Mirren and Danny Welbeck, the names of those who have opposed immigration also appear, including Nigel Farage and Oswald Mosley. Adjacent to the bookshelves is a study space with tablets, where viewers are able to access the artwork’s website (http://thebritishlibraryinstallation.com), learn more about the people named on the books, and review materials selected by the artist that represent different perspectives on immigration. Visitors are also invited to submit their own stories using the tablets, and a selection of these responses is made available on the website. The books can be installed in purpose-built bookshelves to any configuration, or in existing bookshelves.

Vita, Veritas, Victoria

2007, Hew Locke

‘Artifacts from other cultures [are] re-configured and absorbed into a Western framework, their meanings being altered in the process.’ – Hew Locke

Coats of arms like this are symbols of European nobility and monarchy. Locke based his on the royal crest on the front of British passports. Here it suggests climbing plants, as if the gallery walls have become overgrown – much like the ruined colonial structures in Guyana, where Locke grew up. Non-European imagery is incorporated, including figures from pre-Columbian textiles and lions’ faces from central African masks.

Gallery label, August 2024

Ikhonkco

2010, Nicholas Hlobo

Ikhonkco 2010 is a work on paper created using ribbon and rubber. Light pink and off- white ribbon stitches form chain-like shapes in a diagonal line across the paper. At the end of the chain, in the upper left hand corner, a three-dimensional shape made from sections of paper protrudes from the edges of the sheet, partially enclosing a circle of perforations resembling a plughole. Further across, towards the middle of the page, a small piece of black rubber is enclosed by pink stitches at the end of a meandering line. In the artist’s native Xhosa language ‘Ikhonkco’ literally means a buckle from a belt, but it can also relate to a genealogical chain, or family tree. Hlobo has cut and sewn the paper together with his signature ‘baseball’ stitch, which is not just decorative, but also very strong. The cuts in the paper are sharp and clean, determining where the ribbon sutures will be made and how they will overlap.

bystander #14

2016, printed 2021, Mari Katayama

In this self-portrait, Katayama is wearing one of her soft sculptures made from stuffed textile arms. She is lying down on Naoshima Island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. Made during the artist’s residency there, the hands and arms represent both Katayama and residents from the local community. The bystander series is the first time other people’s bodies featured in her work. Stitched with small pearls and decorated with white lace, the sculpture appears to be part of her body yet also alien to her at the same time. This may suggest both the difficulty and the power of living with others, which Katayama encountered during the residency.

Gallery label, October 2023

Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread, Athens)

2017, Cecilia Vicuña

Vicuña calls Quipu Womb a ‘poem in space.’ Over 50 large strands of unspun wool, dyed red, flow down from a metal ring high above our heads. Each cord has different knots spaced rhythmically along its length. The work references menstrual blood as well as the energies, flows and cycles of nature. Vicuña draws from Indigenous weaving practices, ritual, and environmental activism. Many of these works include explorations of the quipu. This is an ancient system of knotting rope used by Inca and Andean cultures, thought to be an alternative to written language. The artist says this ‘must have been a female invention.’

Gallery label, February 2022

Kukulkan

2017, Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín

Antonio Pichilla Quiacain is a Guatemalan artist of Maya Tz’utujil descent. These works draw on the weaving traditions and abstract patterns of Tz’utujil traditional clothing. The black, white, red and yellow in the weavings is symbolic of the four colours of corn grown in Guatemala and central to Maya culture. Pichilla Quiacain is interested in the ancestral knowledge of Indigenous peoples and its continuity in the face of struggle.

Gallery label, November 2022

Queens and Kings

2017, Zohra Opoku

Queens and Kings continues Opoku’s series WHO IS WEARING MY T-SHIRT, exploring the impact of textile waste in Ghana. Screenprinted onto a patchwork of used fabrics, the composition includes the artist and her siblings standing around piles of garments. With leaves and branches disguising their faces, the figures wear second-hand T-shirts and kente cloth passed down by their father, Asante Chief Nana Opoku Guyabaah II of Asato, Volta Region. Kente cloth is a handwoven fabric made from silk and cotton. It was originally produced to dress kings and their courts and is often worn on special occasions. Opoku’s work explores ‘how various types of dress culture are inspired by different social influences’. Through her fabric combinations, she invites us to consider the ways tradition and globalisation intersect in contemporary Ghana.

Gallery label, June 2023

Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night!? (grey and warm yellow)

2017, Petrit Halilaj

Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night!? 2017 is an installation that consists of six large sculptures that take the form of colourful fabric moths. Each sculpture consists of a steel and brass armature on which two fabric wings made from antique Kosovar rugs have been fixed and from which emerge two long polyester fabric tails. The giant fabric insects’ bodies measure over two metres with their shimmering tails extending a further two metres in length. The insects’ heads are made from Flokati handmade shag-pile rug from which protrude antennae made from Chenille wire. The moths are referred to by the overall title Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night!? and are differentiated individually by a colour description. In light green (Tate T15458), the body of the moth is made from a finely woven Dyshek carpet bearing a small, repeating green diamond pattern, bordered by weaved stripes of yellow, blue and red dyed wool; the tail is turquoise. The moth dark pink (Tate T15459), is also formed using antique Dyshek carpet with a dark red diamond weave, bordered by black Chenille wire, with black brush-like antennae and a shiny red tail. There are two pairs of moths which are always displayed together as pairs and installed near to flickering light-bulbs: they are grey and warm yellow (Tate T15460); and light yellow and warm violet (Tate T15461). The moths grey and warm yellow are both made from antique Qilim (or Kilim) rugs: the former is primarily blue and red with a repeated decorative flower-like geometric patterning in blue, green and pale blue; the latter has a red ground with a repeating dark-blue motif. The grey moth is lined with a silky silvery-cloth and has grey furry antennae. The warm yellow insect’s dark red and blue body contrasts with a bright yellow textile tail. Light yellow and warm violet are made respectively from biege Qilim carpet with repeated brown abstract motifs and a bright yellow tail; and a solid cream antique Jan rug with a rich violet-coloured tail and orange fuzzy antennae. Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night!? was commissioned for the exhibition Viva Arte Viva at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 and installed in the Arsenale; here a total of eighteen moths were displayed, suspended from the ceiling and walls, with their long fabric tails trailing onto the floor, and one work placed directly on the floor. The moths can be presented together or in smaller paired groupings. In total the artist has made twenty-three moths. A number of these were included in his solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles from September 2018 to January 2019.

I Want to Be an Insect Protein Entrepreneur

2018, Monster Chetwynd

In I Want to Be an Insect Protein Entrepreneur 2018 a greatly enlarged photocopied reproduction of a detail from a famous Roman first-century BC fresco – the blooming garden from the Villa of Livia on the ancient Via Flaminia to the north of Rome – is adorned by a gargantuan relief ‘witchetty grub’, which was originally made for Chetwynd’s performances The Elixia App and The Cell Group at Bergen Assembly, Norway in 2016. Wrought from latex, fabric and paint, the insect curls across the surface of the work, strapped to a ladder-like sequence of protruding dowels. The fresco has featured a number of times in the artist’s performances, most prominently as the backdrop to Here She Comes 2016 (Arts Council fiftieth anniversary commission, Royal Festival Hall, London). The ancient painting, which was originally installed in an underground dining room, depicts all the flowers and fruits of the garden blooming simultaneously – as if nature’s cycles and seasons had collapsed into a dazzling singularity. This preternatural image of nature’s plenty is doubled in the turgid, fattened form of the grub – suggestive of another, earthier kind of fecundity. Chetwynd refers in the title and subject of this painting to entomophagy (insect-eating), a concept which is attracting increasing interest from sustainability experts, who foresee the use of insect life as a plentiful supply of nutrition for the world’s swelling population. The performances in Bergen evolved out of research into futurology, with The Cell Group being performed by a cast of octogenarians and referring to a range of subjects including the elderly librarians in the science-fiction film classic Soylent Green (1973) and the futuristic vision of the cult film Zardoz (1974).

Reveries of an Underground Forest

2019, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan

For this work, Büyüktaşcıyan studied the displacement of the Mississaugas, the Anishnaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples from their lands during the early development of Toronto, Canada. She also researched the immigration to the city of other displaced populations, such as Punjabi communities during the twentieth century. In doing so, she noted similarities between Punjabi and Anishnaabe textile patterns representing the land and aerial images documenting the present city. These informed the abstract compositions she burned into the surface of her carpets. Büyüktaşçıyan connects this form of markmaking with the significance of burning rituals in Anishnaabe culture. The artist has said, ‘through the act of burning, I began to create surfaces that look almost like monumental petroglyphs – rock carvings – or tree trunks that carry marks of several timelines.’

Gallery label, August 2022

Icon for summoning memory

2022, Alberta Whittle

Alberta Whittle layers raffia palm tree fibres, wool, beads, shells and patches of her grandmother’s fabrics into a richly symbolic composition. A raffia-clad figure, the ‘icon’ of the work’s title, embodies the joyous resistance of carnival. This figure represents an ancestor guiding us toward enlightenment. Their clothing recalls the Shaggy Bear, a character that performs with the Tuk bands at Bajan carnival celebrations. Snakes, philodendron leaves, doilies and diamonds symbolise escape, fertility, women’s labour and divine structures.

Gallery label, December 2025