About
This page brings together my textile art projects. It includes socially engaged practice and studio-based works exploring health, lived experience and resilience. Exhibitions of the work have been shown nationally and internationally in galleries, heritage venues, and museums and shared through publications.
Click a photo to discover the story behind each piece.
Current projects
A participatory textile art project exploring what we lose and what we find in its wake — made with people across Derbyshire, Greater Manchester and beyond.
A textile art project exploring cancer treatment and recovery. Suitable for gallery exhibition, health contexts and research-led programming.
A free embroidery project exploring the landscape you move through — one stitch for every walk you take.
Recent projects
My work includes both solo and socially engaged art projects. Using textiles, I explore personal experience and bring people together to share stories and experiences through making.
Textile art projects can help us look at difficult experiences differently. It offers distraction from distress, moments of relief, and a way to reflect, connect and move forward.
A quilt exploring ancestry, connection and shared storytelling. Designed for exhibition, community engagement and heritage settings.
A participatory textile artwork bringing together stitched stories about breasts, health and body experience to encourage dialogue, awareness and collective understanding.
A social practice textile art project with parent carers, using making to explore visibility, care and the lived experience of non-visible disability.
A menopause-focused quilt combining personal narrative and textile processes to make visible women’s health experiences often overlooked in public conversation.
Across these projects, recurring themes include:
- care and lived experience
- health, illness and recovery
- memory and identity
- collaborative storytelling
- textile traditions in contemporary practice
For exhibition enquiries, collaborations or publication opportunities, please get in touch via link at the bottom of the page.
arthur+martha
From 2007 to 2021, I worked in collaboration with poet Philip Davenport as arts organisation arthur+martha. Together we worked with people affected by homelessness, older people including those living with dementia, Holocaust survivors, war widows, and many others across North West England and beyond.
Together, we created projects that celebrated diverse voices and revealed often-unheard histories, told through stitch, poetry, calligraphy and song.
The collaboration developed large-scale participatory artworks combining textiles, poetry and social practice, exhibited nationally and contributing to conversations around care, memory and social history.
Early Studio Practice (1991-2007)
From 1991 to 2007, my practice focused on studio-based textile and illustration work. I exhibited in over 50 galleries and worked as an illustrator for newspapers including The Times, as well as magazines, greetings cards and gift wrap. Alongside this, I undertook commissions for both private and public settings. I created large-scale wall hangings. I made framed textile works and rugs for homes and public spaces.
This period established the material language and narrative textile approach that continues to inform current work.
Find out more
For exhibition proposals, curatorial research, publications or collaborations, please get in touch or join the mailing list for updates.
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Lois Blackburn 