The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum
Friday 19 September 2025 – Sunday 11 January 2026
The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum will present the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition, Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles, an ambitious group exhibition exploring how artists are using textiles in surprising and radical ways.
Illuminating the diverse roles textiles play in contemporary artistic practice, the exhibition brings together artists who take the intimate and domestic quality of textiles and transform them into theatrical, bold, unsettling and humorous artworks that inspire, challenge and offer new ways of thinking.
Hayward Gallery Touring is the UK’s largest contemporary art organisation producing ambitious touring exhibitions that are often beyond the scope of a single institution. Sitting at the heart of the Southbank Centre, the nation’s engine of creativity, Hayward Gallery Touring aims to create cultural experiences with a bold and imaginative touring programme across the UK.
Featuring work created predominantly over the last decade by 12 UK-based artists, Material Worlds highlights their deep awareness of textiles’ cultural history and a shared desire to challenge its traditional associations, testing the material’s expansive and subversive potential.
The familiar fabric of everyday life is reimagined into the unexpected—the ordinary made extraordinary—to reflect on ideas of gender, identity, community, race, technology, and myth, demonstrating the medium’s potential to transform in the hands of different artists. Material Worlds at The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum will include works by 2025 Turner Prize nominee, Zadie Xa, original prints by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare and ‘Venus’, a larger than life size sculpture by Anna Perach, based on the wax “anatomical Venus” figures crafted in the late 18th century.
Artists featured in the exhibition include Caroline Achaintre, Jonathan Baldock, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Alexandre de Cunha, Tonico Lemos Auad, Paul Maheke, Anna Perach, Yelena Popova, Yinka Shonibare, Rae-Yen Song, Tenant of Culture and Zadie Xa.
“It has been a great pleasure to develop and curate Material Worlds alongside the Hayward Gallery Touring team. I wanted the exhibition to emphasise the transition from something quite everyday, domestic, and supposedly unspectacular, into the creation of fantastical and extraordinary works, worlds, and visions. It has been an enriching experience to encounter such a diverse realm of artists and to create this exhibition featuring affecting pieces by both upcoming and established artists from different generations.”
– Caroline Achaintre, Curator of Material Worlds
“Bringing together a diverse range of artists whose work is imaginatively redefining how textiles are being used in contemporary art, Material Worlds is an expansive exhibition exploring how simple everyday materials are being used to surprise and provoke, creating worlds and telling stories ranging from the personal to the cosmic. We are proud to be the UK’s largest touring contemporary art organisation with exhibitions seen by up to half a million people each year. I’m very excited to be working with our exhibition partners on this project and seeing how the exhibition will transform for each gallery and museum along the tour.”
– Brian Cass, Senior Curator of Hayward Gallery Touring
“The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum is very excited to present Material Worlds as part of our exhibitions programme, which creates new links between our historic collection and artists and makers working today. Textiles are crucial for offering insights into different cultures, technologies, and artistic expressions. The artists in Material Worlds explore the potential of the medium in new and exciting ways whilst demonstrating its provocative and transformative potential. We are excited to share this ambitious series of works with communities across Cheltenham and Gloucester, and to foster new conversations through our public and learning programmes.”
– Layla Gatens, Senior Curator of Art and Exhibitions at The Wilson
Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles is curated by Caroline Achaintre with Hayward Gallery Touring. At the Wilson Art Gallery and Museum, the exhibition will be complemented by a public programme that includes artist led workshops for families and home educators, and exhibition tours.
Further details on the public programme will be announced later this year at www.cheltenhammuseum.org.uk
About the Wilson Art Gallery and Museum
The Wilson is Gloucestershire’s premier art gallery and museum located in the centre of Cheltenham. The Wilson is home to an internationally significant museum collection, including a designated Arts and Crafts Movement collection, fine art collections, and The Open Archive, which houses fascinating archives relating to Antarctic explorer Edward A. Wilson and Cheltenham’s history. The Wilson is a space for art and learning and presents an ambitious programme of exhibitions, events and an artist development programme We Are Creators, which supports emerging visual artists from across Cheltenham and Gloucestershire by providing studio space and support. The Wilson is managed by The Cheltenham Trust, an independent and not-for-profit charity.
For further information, images and interviews please contact
communications@cheltenhamtrust.org.uk
The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum
Clarence Street
Cheltenham GL50 3JT
Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am – 5pm
Free Entry.
Website: www.cheltenhammuseum.org.uk
Social Media: @thewilsonchelt
About Hayward Gallery Touring
Hayward Gallery Touring is the UK’s largest contemporary art organisation producing touring exhibitions. Based at Southbank Centre, Hayward Gallery Touring works with a range of artists, curators, designers and writers to develop curatorial projects and ambitious exhibitions that are often beyond the scope of a single institution. Hayward Gallery Touring’s programme includes British Art Show—the largest and most significant exhibition of contemporary art produced in the UK—as well as thematic group shows and monographic exhibitions created for venues including museums, galleries, art centres, libraries, schools, hospitals and other unexpected partners and places.
Hayward Gallery Touring exhibitions are seen by up to half a million people in over 45 cities and towns each year.
About Southbank Centre
The Southbank Centre is the UK’s largest arts centre, occupying 11 acres along the river and its 4 venues anchor London’s most vibrant cultural quarter on the South Bank of the Thames.
We exist to present great cultural experiences that bring people together and we achieve this by providing the space for artists to create and present their best work and by creating a place where as many people as possible can come together to experience bold, unusual and eye-opening work. The site has an extraordinary creative and architectural history stretching back to the 1951 Festival of Britain. Southbank Centre is made up of the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery as well as being home to the National Poetry Library and the Arts Council Collection. It is also home to six Resident Orchestras (Aurora Orchestra, Chineke! Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Philharmonia Orchestra).
Website: www.southbankcentre.co.uk
Facebook: Southbank Centre
Instagram: @southbankcentre
X (formally Twitter): @southbankcentre
NOTES TO EDITORS
Image Credits (Left to right and top to bottom)
Rae-Yen Song, song dynasty ○○○, (2021). Assorted appliquéd fabrics, copper, paper maché, painted MDF, steel and PVC. Image credit: Tiu Makkonen.
Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Dual, 2006–07; Malevolent Coat Hook, 2005; Cluny, 2006 © Cabinet Gallery, London and Marc Camille Chaimowicz Studio. Installation view, Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles, Mead Gallery. A Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition. Photography © Luke Pickering.
Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, ‘Creatures of the Mappa Mundi – Epiphagi’, 2018 – 2019. Patchwork, appliqué, embroidery and Dutch wax printed cotton textile, 191 x 135cm (75 1/4 x 53 1/4in). Copyright Yinka Shonibare CBE RA. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photo by Stephen White & Co.
Caroline Achaintre, (new work at Visual Carlow) HEL, 2023. Tufted wool, on steel frame. Copyright Caroline Achaintre. Photography © Ros Kavanagh.
Anna Perach, Glove, 2023. Tufted axminster yarn, artificial leather on aluminium clamp. Image by Andy Keate, courtesy of Gasworks London.
