Autumn Textiles Showcase
Autumn marks both an ending and a beginning a gathering-in before the quiet of winter, a celebration of cycles, of making, and of mending. Autumn Textiles: Threads of Renewal brings together nine artists working across woven, stitched, and sculpted forms, each exploring the relationship between material, memory, and transformation.
As curator, I was drawn to how these practices intertwine tradition and experimentation, reminding us that textiles are more than fabric they are language, history, and touch. In each work, there’s a sense of renewal: the re-use of natural fibres, the re-imagining of inherited techniques, the reawakening of tactile connection in a digital age.
Together, these artists invite us to slow down, to notice the texture of the season to hold in our hands what might otherwise fall away.
Ashanti Farquhar
Ikat Weavings
Naturally dyed fibres (madder, turmeric, indigo, tansy, logwood), raffia, wool, paper yarn | Various sizes | 2025
Ashanti Farquhar’s weaving practice explores identity, heritage, and ancestral memory through the intricate resist-dye technique of ikat. By hand-tying and dyeing threads before weaving, she embeds pattern within the fibre itself, a design revealed only through the act of making, held in tension and intention.
Working with natural dyes rooted in Caribbean material culture, her palette celebrates brightness, rhythm, and cultural inheritance. Her textiles ask how memory travels—across land, across time, through the body, and within the thread.
Supported by the Frank Bowling Scholarship, Ashanti weaves history and futurity into fibre, honouring belonging and the beauty of difference.
Daphne O’Connell
Robin
Hand-stitched textile | 42 × 52.5 cm | 2022 | £295
Self-taught textile artist Daphne O’Connell approaches hand embroidery with quiet devotion, layering thread, cloth, and care into works that feel intimate and deeply observed. Rooted in patience and precision, her practice honours the slow rhythms of making and the quiet poetry found in nature’s smallest details.
In Robin, Daphne turns to one of autumn’s most familiar messengers. Through fine stitching and subtle texture, she captures the bird’s bright presence, a flash of red among turning leaves, a gentle reminder of warmth and resilience as the days draw in.
This piece doesn’t demand attention; it offers it. Robin glows with tenderness and stillness, inviting a pause, a moment to notice, to breathe, to dwell in simplicity and care.
Ann M Dugdale
Autumn
Textile / mixed media | 30 × 42 cm | 2025 | £75
Patagonia
Hand weaving | 30 × 42 cm | 2019 | NFS
Self-taught textile artist Ann M Dugdale works intuitively across fabric, paper, thread, and paint, creating light-filled compositions that move between collage, stitch, and weave. Her practice balances chance and precision, finding quiet form in the overlooked and discarded.
In Autumn, a scrap cloth once used for screen-printing tests becomes both structure and landscape. From its accidental marks, Ann draws the suggestion of buildings and fallen leaves, layering it with naturally dyed cotton organdie to evoke season and transformation.
Patagonia, woven from garden string and Chilean wool, translates travel into texture threads holding the memory of place and journey within tactile geometry.
Ann’s work reveals poetry in remnants: small, quiet stories of attention and renewal, where fragments become worlds and the ordinary turns luminous through care.
Anna Stickland
Apple
Willow and wood | 70 × 70 cm | 2025 | £250
Willow grower and basketmaker Anna Stickland works directly with the land-tending, harvesting, and transforming living material into sculptural form. Her practice bridges agriculture and craft, revealing the quiet dialogue between growth, decay, and renewal.
In Apple, a found wooden ring, the remnant of a branch hollowed by time becomes the heart of a woven sphere. Willow rods are drilled, bent, and tensioned into a closed vessel that recalls orchard fruit at harvest. The work holds both structure and surrender, capturing nature’s cycles through form.
Here, nature is not merely depicted but present-alive in fibre, curve, and grain. Apple becomes both object and meditation: a study of rhythm, patience, and the enduring pulse of the seasons.
Sofía Barbé
Felted Wall Works & Soft Sculpture
Needle-felting, wool, mixed fibres | Various sizes
Uruguayan-born and London-based artist Sofía Barbé infuses her textile practice with playfulness and emotional depth. Working with natural fibres and unexpected materials such as coconut coir and mycelium, she creates tactile forms that bridge craft, imagination, and care.
Her work celebrates spontaneity and sensory joy-bright, organic, and gently surreal. Each piece feels like a small, living world, inviting touch and curiosity while grounding itself in sustainable making.
Based at Cockpit Studios, Sofía explores how colour, fibre, and form can reconnect us to nature, memory, and the imaginative landscapes often lost in adulthood.
Her practice reminds us that renewal can also mean wonder: the courage to approach the world with openness and delight.
Estella Montague
Quilted Toys
Scrap fabrics, quilted and hand-stitched | Various sizes | Prices vary
For textile artist Estella Montague, cloth is a keeper of memory. Each fabric she stitches once lived another life-worn, loved, used and through quiet transformation becomes something new to hold and care for.
Working intuitively with reclaimed materials, Estella lets texture, colour, and chance guide her process. The resulting quilted toys are playful yet deeply human companions made of history, warmth, and reinvention.
Her practice is a gentle act of renewal, reminding us that re-making is a form of care and that the discarded still carries tenderness.
Currently showing work at Miss Lou’s Café & Art Space in Nottingham, Estella is also developing personal commissions that transform cherished textiles into tactile keepsakes.
Lucinda Button
The Forest in Fall
Textiles & mixed media | 28 × 28 cm | £250
Working with reclaimed cloth, found objects, and delicate hand-stitching, Lucinda Button creates intimate textile works grounded in care and attention. Her practice transforms overlooked materials fabric remnants, dye tests, and fragments of nature into contemplative, layered compositions.
The Forest in Fall, made for the High Weald National Landscapes Nature Calling project, evokes a woodland at the edge of change. Heat-press transfers, embroidery, and varnished acorns combine in a quiet meditation on season, patience, and renewal.
Lucinda’s work invites stillness and environmental awareness, holding fragility and resilience in balance. Each piece becomes a small act of reverence, a reminder that care begins with noticing.
Christine Gibson
Colours of Autumn
Freestyle bobbin lace with textured threads on bark | A5 | 2022 | Not for Sale
There is a quiet poetry in lace, and in Christine Gibson’s hands it becomes warmly contemporary. A member of @98lace, she approaches bobbin lace not as fixed tradition but as a living language, guided by colour, touch, and intuition.
In Colours of Autumn, Christine moves away from strict pattern into something instinctive, tracing the form of a leaf and filling it with variegated threads that unfold their own rhythms. Mounted on bark, the piece carries the textures of forest floor and turning leaves a gentle meditation on season, memory, and change.
For Christine, autumn holds personal resonance: a time of warmth and transformation linked to her daughter’s birth. Her practice reflects this sense of mindful transition, reminding us that slow craft carries grace, and that thread-like time-can be trusted to unfold.
Rosalind Stoddart
Where the Earth Meets the Sky
Handwoven plant-dyed alpaca fleece and cotton cord
The Giving Earth
Felted alpaca fleece and cotton cord
There is a quiet kind of magic in work that is grown as much as it is made. Rosalind Stoddart, a sustainable textile artist, cultivates colour from the earth and gathers fibre from her own alpacas, weaving not only materials but time, patience, and care into every piece.
Working with natural dyes she forages and grows herself, Rosalind’s practice is an act of reciprocity art created withnature, not from it. Her process moves with the rhythm of the seasons, grounded in soil health, ecological respect, and deep material understanding. Each work unfolds slowly, shaped by the living systems that sustain it.
Where the Earth Meets the Sky is a meditation on horizon and presence, a woven reminder of the humility that comes from looking upward into vastness. The Giving Earth reflects on what the land offers and what we owe in return, dyed with madder roots nurtured for three years before yielding their deep red glow.
Rosalind’s work invites us to slow down, to notice, and to remember that creation-like soil-thrives through care, gratitude, and renewal. Her practice embodies a grounded beauty: art as stewardship, and making as a form of quiet activism.
