Ann Sutton: On From Weaving – A Survey

27 Nov 2021-20 Feb 2022

Overview

The New Art Centre is delighted to announce a major survey of pioneering British textile artist Ann Sutton (born 1935).

The exhibition will feature works from every decade of Sutton’s career, from her early days as a student at the Cardiff College of Art, through the 1960s and 1970s when she worked on both two- and three-dimensional textiles, and on to recent painted works, made after Sutton sold her looms in 2010 – a radical act for someone so feted as a textile artist and yet a move entirely in keeping with Sutton’s uncompromising attitude as an artist. As Richard Howells, Emeritus Professor of Visual Culture at King’s College London, writes, Ann Sutton ‘has always been moving resolutely upstream, against the flow… but doing so with a heady combination of freedom and restraint.’

The exhibition will highlight Sutton’s endless experimentation as she pushes the boundaries of what can be ‘woven’ (plastic, linen, nylon monofilament etc.) and how the necessary geometry of warp and weft can become the starting point for a wider enquiry into systems, pattern, order, balance and harmony.  The show will also demonstrate her experimentation with colour, often in contrast to a more formal poetry of monochrome. 

On From Weaving intends to bring Sutton’s work to a wider audience and is inspired by the acquisition in 2021 by Tate, through the New Art Centre, of four important woven pieces from the mid-1960s, as well as the recent display of her work in the Crafts Council newly opened galleries.