The Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) presents Threads: Contemporary Textiles & the Social Fabric. Open through 5 February 2012.

Threads transformed through knitting, weaving, looping and stitching are the most flexible of materials. Often carrying significant personal and cultural narratives, they move across temporal and spatial boundaries, connecting old and new ideas, just as they provide important links between people, places and ways of life. Threads also have the capacity to unravel, opening up possibilities for innovation, discord and creative change.

Bringing together a diverse range of contemporary textiles from the Gallery’s Australian, Asian and Pacific Collections, ‘Threads: Contemporary Textiles and the Social Fabric’ celebrates the ways in which contemporary artists explore and extend the textile medium. Many works draw on traditional textile practices while also engaging new technologies, materials and imagery to reflect and transform existing social, political and cultural conditions. Through the visually striking designs, skilled techniques and richly textured surfaces of contemporary textiles, the exhibition investigates their function as a form of skin or interface with other cultures, the use of abstraction and rhythm to engage with local environments, the weaving of new histories and ideas of nation, and the continued vitality of garden imagery. qag.qld.gov.au

Image: Lao Textiles (studio) | Carol Cassidy (designer) United States/Laos b.1956 | Champa Phimmalay (weaver) Laos b.1945 | Climbing monkey (detail) 2007 | Silk, commercial dyes | 63 x 168cm | Purchased 2008. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery

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3. GoMA Presents Exhibition of Contemporary 21st Century International Art