Mythic Thread

Mythic Thread brings together thirteen contemporary artists who are redefining relationships between tradition and modernity within contemporary textile-making, shining new light on ancient practices. Encompassing global histories and speculative futures, this exhibition uncovers an instrumental relationship between textile-making and mythology, spirituality, folklore, and our relationship with the natural world.

Inspired by The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Renin Bilginer’s work ‘Kore, Persephone Incarnate’ explores the Ancient Greek Goddess’ cyclical rising and falling between the underworld and Earth, within the context of mixed heritage. The work re-examines the narrative of Persephone stolen by Hades into the underworld, exploring her becoming as a symbol of empowerment, through her ability to move between worlds. Also recontextualising Greek Mythology, Andia Coral Newton’s work dwells on a chimera for the ever-changing and overstimulating 21st Century. Newton’s chimera, as with the Minotaur and Cerunnos, is intended to prompt a questioning of the viewer’s humanness, their relationship to their own body, and that body’s relationship to its environment. Furthermore, Patrick Stratton’s tapestry is inspired by the Three Fates – Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos – and their role severing the thread of life in Greek mythology. The piece explores the concept of an invisible line materially through a dual gradient of the same hue shifting in opposite directions, ultimately creating the Three Fates thread of life.

Praise poems are a feature of oral rituals that exist in a variety of African cultures, with the purpose of celebrating the achievements or good characteristics of a person or thing. Valerie Asiimwe Amani uses this concept within her work ‘Mahali, A Beautiful endlessness’, which is set within an ethereal space, where the figure can be anything (or anyone) – a symbol of possibility. Emmanuel Boateng’s ‘Wuforo Dua Pa’ encompasses fragments of cut out kente motifs in embodying the Akan proverb that encourages the support of all noble endeavours. Through rhythmic interlacing and repetition of patterns, the work serves as a visual narrative, echoing the wisdom embedded in Akan Ashanti folktales steeped in spiritual beliefs and ancestral knowledge.

Presenting a reinterpretation of English folklore, Heidi Pearce questions ideas of belonging, social interaction and humour through the notion of the uncanny, and – in this instance – a sculptural reimagining of the Black Shuck myth. Through a muddied colour palette, Pearce emphasises the mundanity of the everyday, deliberately standing in contrast to the elusive mystery shrouding the myth. Our encounter with English folklore continues in the works of Sean Savage Ferrari, where materials become collaborators, revealing the Genius Loci—the spirit of place shaped by history, memory, and ecology. Ferrari invokes the Genius Loci as a contemporary reflection of English folklore, where landscapes were seen as alive with spirits.

Zethu Maseko’s work depicts two hybrid human figures that gracefully ascend a mountain to decant the seawater they have collected. This ritual, imagined as an eternal cycle, treats the seawater with reverence—as a sacred vessel of wisdom and life. The work alludes to the ongoing exploitation and mistreatment of the ocean, highlighting the tension between nature’s sacred essence and human intervention. In Adam Boyd’s ‘Sobel Edge’, a photograph of a shadow cast by a mountain range became the starting point for a material investigation, to “expose” the edges of the perceived reality in the image. Flipping the photographic element on its side, an inverse, “shadow-world” is depicted in a gestural monotype sewn alongside. Divya Sharma’s work is about place-making and the imagining of vanished homelands and civilizations. In this work, Sharma finds herself communing with an ancestor matriarch from whom she searches for wisdom, imagining the Proto-Tamil woman’s deep connection to the earth and spirit.

Made following a residency in Oaxaca, Mexico, Melania Toma’s work reflects the artist’s own experience of this landscape, inviting viewers to embark on a journey that draws so many parallels to its history and spirituality. By doing so, we discover a narrative that encapsulates the essence of Toma’s creative process – a journey from meditation to manifestation. Maria Saygua André presents new work from her Fourreaux series, composed of bead sculptures made from clay using a crochet technique. A fourreau is defined as a sheath designed to enclose objects, yet André here questions whether her work could be seen an object of ritual, spirituality, or perhaps merely utilitarian. The work reveals an organic quality, evoking seeds, fruits, or buds – symbols of fertility – drawing on the artist’s research into the aesthetics of abundance. For Alejandra Mizrahi, material and technique are also foundational for her work’s concepts. The sculpture’s morphology responds to step by step motif schemes of the techniques found through research into knitting manuals, where different textile logics, temporalities, and materialities can be identified, all of which seek to challenge their lightness, weight, and the historical significance of these practices.

The breadth of research, technique and worldbuilding on display in Mythic Thread unites through the artists’ shared understanding of both textile’s expansive material possibilities, and it’s place throughout global histories as a foundational catalyst for worlds beyond our own.