Soft Landing - Threads Textiles Festival

'Soft Landing' is a group exhibition featuring work from artists Heidi Brickell, Vita Cochran, Finn Ferrier, Serene Hodgman, Fiona Jack, and Kathryn Tsui. The exhibition brings together a selection of artists who each engage with textiles on their own terms, incorporating material aspects into distinctly different modes of making. While their practices vary greatly, many of these artists share a similar engagement with narrative – real or imagined – and a preoccupation with re-addressing or re-presenting histories. Historically speaking, traditional textile arts have somewhat been maligned and dismissed as insubstantial. But it is arguably this exact history that makes textiles so engaging; their tactility and ostensibly quiet nature allowing for the deft navigation of complex ideas, providing a soft landing for sometimes heavily political concepts.

'Soft Landing' is presented in conjunction with Threads: Textile Festival, a programme of art events that will take place across Te Whanganui-a-Tara from 16-20 March 2022. Timed to coincide with the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts, the festival will shed light on contemporary and historical textile practices in Aotearoa, placing renewed emphasis on the medium.