Radical Textiles, the home-grown summer blockbuster at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA until 30 March 2025) is ebullient, celebratory, rewarding and responds to a rapidly growing interest: over the past two decades, textiles as an artistic medium, and textile practices as forms of cultural expression, have become increasingly important in contemporary art museums and exhibitions, part of an explosion of artistic media that speaks to women’s lives and work, and to subcultural energies. In short, this show is timely.

Textiles have long been important in AGSA’s collection, so Radical Textiles delights with wonderful works: from the enormous Morris & Co. tapestry (1900-2) that is one of the gallery’s greatest treasures to a raft of acquisitions made for the show. It also includes a fabulous display of South Australian trade union banners on a bright red wall, as well as miniscule statements by the Stitch & Resist project, coordinated by Adelaide’s Centre of Democracy in 2020 – local craftivists inspiring community courage in the plague year. And there you have it in a nutshell: radicality in textiles as a sort of Adelaide lineage of making, arguing for the city’s progressive bent, expressed through craft. Co-curator Rebecca Evans’s fine-grained essay explores the political implications of textiles, one particular sense of the word ‘radical’: how the Adelaide School of Design (1861-1916), for example, was part of that history, encouraging women to make an independent living at the time when South Australia in 1894 became only the second place in the world to grant women the vote. Much later, from 1973-74, with the foundation of Adelaide’s JamFactory, professional textiles training was once more supported, as well as being taught in the city’s art schools. With the inclusion of community-based works like the Deaf Community Tapestry (1991) and the AIDS Memorial Quilt Block 70 (early 1990s), there is ample evidence of Adelaide’s embrace of textiles acting as text, as active speech, in closely observed contexts.

Installation view: Radical Textiles, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (photograph by Saul Steed)

Yet this strand of explicitly socially engaged work is only one form of textile ‘radicality’ essayed in this sumptuous yet oddly unsatisfactory exhibition. Contrary to the old saying, excess doesn’t always succeed. Despite its confident title, Radical Textiles doesn’t manage a clear articulation of its idea of radicality, opting to explore many forms of textiles. The exhibition suffers from diverging interests, distracting disjunctions, and from over-crowding, as a plethora of ideas jostle for elbow room. Experimental fashion from international stars such as Junya Watanabe and Iris Van Herpen, for instance, sits alongside energetic First Nations fashion and Queer couture, a tension that is immediately announced in the handsome catalogue. The opening images are exemplary pieces of contemporary fashion, by Vivienne Westwood and Issey Miyake, so we immediately see that ‘radicality’ encompasses glamour. Whose radicality, then? Eventually, I think, the exhibition encompasses works made from textiles as much as works interrogating the medium. So, while ‘textiles’ is not one practice but many – multiple histories, ambitions, contexts – we are left asking what makes these particular works ‘radical’?

The problem appears with the introductory text by co-curators Rebecca Evans and Leigh Robb: it raises important ideas about care and community, but doesn’t convincingly argue an exhibition thesis. The catalogue then groups most (though not all) works under five headings – Revival, Resistance, Reconciliation, Radical Bodies, Remembrance – with much fine writing, including by artist participants, which collectively makes a great contribution to contemporary understandings of textiles. It is instructive, therefore, that both Blake Griffiths, writing on Liz Williamson’s Weaving Eucalyptus Project (2020-21), and Kay Lawrence on the 1994 centenary tapestries, go directly to what ‘radicality’ might be. Paul Yore’s essay ‘Let us not die from habit’, was a particular pleasure, a manifesto of sorts for the restorative value of making textiles. In a generous miscellany, Jon Altman’s exemplary piece on his Emily Kam Kngwarray batik shirt, dated 1984, Madeleine C.P. Seys’s splendid ‘Queering the wardrobe’, addressing Don Dunstan’s infamous pink shorts, and Skye Bartlett and Timothy Roberts’s excellent text on AIDS quilts offer a sense of the scope of this project: these textiles changed ideas, norms, lives.

But back to the exhibition. Perhaps five potential shows are gathered here, in a kind of over-compensatory insistence perhaps? There are socially inspired works, including Kay Lawrence’s tapestries made for the House of Assembly in the South Australian Parliament, commemorating the 1994 centenary of women’s suffrage; fascinating technological innovations in tapestry making over several centuries, with recent digital developments leading to ravishing works by contemporary artists including the American Kiki Smith; historical and commemorative quilting, often collective and community-based, from Rebecca King’s Quilt (c.1890-95), made as a wedding gift, to Nell’s collective Nell Anne Quilt (2020-24) encompassing more than 400 individual contributors; works which illustrate the power of fashion to express social identities, as well as resist social pressures; and the spectacular contemporary works from recent decades, in a variety of textiles, from artists as diverse as Yinka Shonibare, Eko Nugroho, Francis Upritchard, and Sally Smart. So Radical Textiles is energetic – but in the end it frustrates understanding.

As it happens, many delightful works fall under none of the stated categories: the late Liz Williamson’s beautiful Weaving Eucalyptus Project (2020-21) quietly suggests the potential of Australian organic dyes, using threads dyed with eucalyptus plants gathered from tress dispersed across the globe; Maggie Hensel-Brown’s astonishing needle-lace picture January 24^th (2024) was a revelation; and I loved the joyous dress and dilly bag from 2021 by Trudy Inkamala and Sheree Inkamala.

While my curator’s fingers itch to quibble about unhappy juxtapositions and omissions, I will mention just one: Ngarrindjeri weaving. Kay Lawrence points out in her essay that the 1994 Votes for Women tapestry depicts a coiled Ngarrindjeri mat as a symbol of the existing society on which South Australian life was built. Ngarrindjeri weavings are so beautiful, so compelling, so rooted in the earth, that this was a missed opportunity

Finally, a word about Don Dunstan’s pink shorts, which made their historic appearance fifty years to the day before this exhibition opened. I wonder how long South Australia can continue to celebrate this abbreviated garment without honouring its legacy? The Art Gallery of South Australia is bursting at the seams, as this over-crowded show once more makes clear; at least one gallery has been turned into a storage space, and there are clear signs of budgetary constrictions. Why do contemporary politicians not understand, as Dunstan so clearly did, the importance of investing in our cultural future? In today’s risk-averse climate, that would be radical.

Full disclosure: I contributed a patch to the Nell Anne quilt.

Radical Textiles continues at the Art Gallery of South Australia until 30 March 2025.