London Craft Week, an annual event that is a celebration of contemporary craft, provides a prominent platform for artists, designers, and makers to showcase their work and skills across the sprawling city of London. With a diverse array of workshops, demonstrations, exhibitions, and engaging talks, the event serves as a testament to the enduring appreciation of contemporary craft and its multifaceted expressions.

In the context of this year's London Craft Week, I had the privilege of collaborating with the wonderful Catherine-Marie Longtin to curate an artist-led exhibition that showcased the works of contemporary textile artists. Rooted in traditional craft skills and techniques, our shared vision emerged through extensive discussions that commenced in November of 2022. It became apparent that the opportunity beckoned to create an exhibition that would harmoniously intertwine our own artistic endeavours with those of other practitioners within the same medium, albeit with their own distinctive creative approaches.

In the early stages, meticulous planning and fruitful conversations with the London Craft Week team proved invaluable. Their advice and unwavering support propelled our exhibition idea, "Quilts: A Material Culture," from conception to a tangible reality.

Our curatorial intent for the show revolved around handpicking artists whose creative direction and focus instilled within us a sense of excitement and inspiration. We sought out those who redefined the boundaries of traditional practices, breathing fresh life into time-honoured methods, while simultaneously traversing diverse creative disciplines. Our overarching aspiration was to offer audiences an enthralling encounter with the dynamism of quilting in contemporary society—an art form that transcends conventional notions of craft, seamlessly integrating elements of artistry, form, and function.

As the exhibition took shape, each artist was personally invited to partake in this collective endeavour. The enthusiastic response from each participant fostered a spirit of community, as we embarked on a shared journey, pooling our collective talents and expertise to realise the exhibition's full potential. Together, we devoted ourselves to the meticulous orchestration of the show and curating an experience that would captivate visitors during this year's London Craft Week, 2023.

With the support of Batsford Gallery in Hackney, who were kind enough to offer us their new gallery space as the destination for the show, we set out to bring the exhibition to fruition. Thus, "Quilts: A Material Culture" was born.

Running from the 9th to the 14th of May, our week-long show garnered incredible support from the press and industry professionals, hosting a plethora of visitors over the six days it ran for.

We are immensely thankful for all the people who supported the event and the visitors who came to see us. The feedback was incredible and made us all very proud to showcase our work at such a prestigious event on London's creative design calendar.

Quilts: A Material Culture

A ‘state of the craft’ exhibition surveying contemporary quilt-making at the newly opened Batsford Gallery. Building upon a resurgence of interest in quilts as functional art, five artists with distinctive practices demonstrate the pliancy of a form which stretches from contemplative colour study to organic abstraction and the avant-garde.

A quilt is multilayered, complex in both material and meaning. It is intimate and public, autobiographical and communal. It can be didactic or celebratory; rhythmic and mathematical in form or freehand, figurative, functional. Quilts connect us all by threads and scraps to memory and narrative, to traces of community and history. They are a practice, a language, a material culture that can be endlessly revived, reworked and, as here, renewed.

The artists share a deep engagement with the materiality of cloth as the springboard for expression, present in each act of cutting, placing, layering and stitching which, finally, forms a coherent whole.

Catherine Marie Longtin draws on minimalist abstract art in a conversation between material and technique, concept and form, reference and creation.

Julius Arthur’s work blurs the boundary between art and function; objects bear meaning through their connection with the day-to-day.

Sophie Giller’s work emphasises process, labour, craft, care, domesticity, emotion and the social history of everyday materials.

Adam Herbert embraces and celebrates small mismatches of pattern which show the hand of the maker.

In Kate Williams’ large quilted panels, imagined architectural forms cast high-key shadows in desaturated, empty landscapes.

The Batsford Gallery is a new East London gallery space launched by Batsford Books, a leading publisher of art books, specialist in textiles and applied arts and originator of the Batsford Prize. The bright, airy space is located between Broadway Market and Columbia Road, and showcases work by leading artists, makers and designers.

Private View was sponsored by BEAK Brewery, Lewes. An independent craft brewery creating the finest selection of ales made in Sussex.

Meet the artist

Kate Williams Studio | @kate_williams_studio

“My practice consists primarily of large quilted panels in which imagined architectural forms cast high-key shadows in desaturated, empty landscapes. Through the scale of the pieces, in the brittleness of their light and their sugary, pop palette, I try to evoke an eerie yet pleasurable sense of estrangement – as if Di Chirico had been transplanted to 1980s Miami.

I’m intrigued by the ersatz classicism of 80s Postmodernism, including its playful pillaging of 18th-century trompe l’oeil. There is similar playfulness in the conjunction of rigid architecture and pliant cloth in my work: a pleasing interplay between the quilted fabric and the spatial arrangement of the structures it describes. The long lines of stitching delineate bricks and tiles, conjuring a slightly discordant perspective – then shift planes, retreating into the familiar low relief of ‘quilt as decorative object’.”

Kate Williams is a documentary filmmaker turned visual artist who lives and works in Walthamstow, East London. She works with quilted textiles in linen and wool; her themes are the self in postmodernity and the pleasures and pains of the alienation inherent to the age.

Catherine-Marie Longtin | @catherinemarielongtin | www.catherinemarielongtin.com

Catherine-Marie Longtin is a Montreal-born French Canadian quilt-maker and textile artist living and working in South East London. She learned how to sew from her mother and started experimenting with fabrics by sewing bed linens and kitchen textiles as a teenager. After a PhD in cognitive sciences and a career in academia that took her from Montreal to Paris, Lyon and Cambridge, she went back to her love of textiles. Since 2016 she has had a studio in South East London, near her home where she lives with her husband and two children. She does commission work for private clients and sells quilts and artworks online, via open studio events and textile fairs.

Her designs are inspired by minimalist abstract art and display a quietly confident sense of colour. She works mostly with linen but also with wool and cotton, along with a collection of carefully curated prints, plaids and striped fabrics. She designs quilts directly on her studio wall, in full size, and through a process of back-and-forth between concept and construction her quilts take shape. More recently, she has taken on the possibilities offered by hand stitching, in particular by using the traditional English paper piecing technique that she combines with freehand drawings. Her compositions sit at the junction of arts and crafts while challenging the viewers’ preconceptions of what a quilt can be.

For Catherine-Marie, creating a quilt is the meeting of colour, texture and form: a tactile, visual and emotional undertaking stemming from the sheer pleasure of putting two fabrics side by side and seeing where it goes. What follows is a conversation between material and technique, concept and form, reference and creation..

Adam Herbert |@adam.herbert

I am a print and pattern designer specialising in textiles. I studied Printed Textiles at the Glasgow School of Art before completing an MA at The Royal College of Art, and for the past 20 years, I’ve worked with some of the world’s most prestigious fashion and textile brands.

I began working with quilts as a response to the 2020 lockdown and was immediately captured by the process – a new medium through which I could combine singular forms and colours into repeating patterns that create rhythm and movement. Most of my quilts are made from plain or minimal fabrics such as shirting stripes; the pattern emerges as I begin to arrange the fabric into repeating units. This has become an integral part of my practice – as the pattern builds up, so does the personality of the quilt.

Pattern and colour, and especially these things in combination, generate a very emotional response in me – I am a magpie who constantly gathers inspiration from the world around me: a tiled floor in a café, a piece of architecture or a Renaissance fresco. My process embraces and celebrates the hand-made quality of the pieces I produce; small mismatches of patterns show the hand of the maker. Each quilt is imbued with as much of my spirit as possible.

Sophie Giller | @gillersophie | www.sophiegiller.co.uk

Sophie Giller (b.1992, Norfolk) is an artist working mostly with textiles, to emphasise process, labour, craft, care, domesticity, emotion, and the social history of everyday materials. She attended Camberwell College of the Arts for a BA in Painting and completed her MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 2021.

The artist works intuitively and autobiographically. She collects and reacts to materials she comes across in second-hand shops, workplaces, and homes, and explores the sentimentality and emotion preserved in leftover items. Recently, she has been sewing, dyeing and weaving, which involves building, joining, and latticing, enabling these materials to come together and have a new life.

The previous lives and functions of these textiles give them each a unique personality and character. She’s interested in craft processes and their associations: repetition, healing, the body, class, domesticity, labour, and different contexts of art making and creativity. Her work takes on sculptural, painting-like and site-specific qualities while exploring the space between fine art and craft.

Her work has been shown in galleries such as the ICA, Saatchi Gallery, and Standpoint Gallery, and has been featured in The Times, World of Interiors, Reclaim Mag and Time Out and is held in private collections.

A special thank you

A special thank you to Tim Crocker for photographing the event.

The amazing team at Batsford Books and Gallery, To Polly, Frida and Hattie as well as Cam and all the gallery and bookshop team.

To Sophie Gillers Father, who helped us with the set building and gallery installation, thank you for all your help. Thank you to the team at London Craft Week for helping us host the show and for all your support during the event.

A massive thank you to the visitors and guests who attended the exhibition, we all hope you enjoyed it.

To all the artists who took part. Thank you for being incredible, talented and welcoming. We all made new friends and shared so much in the process.