Every time I visit the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, I make it my mission to seek out the textile art. In earlier years I had to hunt for these pieces, most of which were woven. More recently, however, I’ve noticed an expansion of craft techniques, with artists embracing felting, sewing, quilting, embroidery, beading, and more.

Techniques associated with craft have long been relegated to the bottom of the aesthetic hierarchy. Much of what determines whether a technique is categorised as art or craft is its historical association with women’s labour – women’s work has always been valued less. Yet the contemporary artists we see engaging with these practices aren’t just raising their value in the art world – they are opening up conversations about matrilineal inheritance, domestic labour, and the histories embedded in fabric and thread.

This year’s fair showcased an incredible range of textile techniques: crochet, wet felting, needle felting, weaving, knitting, beading, embroidery, sewing, natural dyeing, and quilting. In every stitch and fibre these works challenge outdated hierarchies, asserting their rightful place in contemporary art.

(All photos by P Smith Photography.)

Cow Mash

Gallery: Berman Contemporary All Women Art

Both Cow Mash and her work carry an undeniable gravity. Standing before her blackened booth, my eyes are drawn deeper, exposing details hidden in the darkness.

Plastic Kraal envisions an imagined farm, a utopian space of Black female land ownership and ecological wisdom, built from fragments of lost generational knowledge. Cow’s work wrestles with inheritance: the skills and traditions severed by colonialism, language, capitalism, and displacement, and the weight of reconstructing them in a new, suburban reality.

 

At the centre, her tufted work commands attention. It resembles an aerial view of farmland, black cows moving through fields of densely packed wool – its presence both weighty and soft. Cow likens the work to the children’s play mats that depict roads and cities, shaping a child’s vision of their future while limiting their ambitions to suburbia.

When asked about her choice of materials, Cow says: “My grandmother sewed, my mother sews, so there’s always fabric around me. The texture of softness is what’s nostalgic for me. But also just thinking of the softness of women, and the brutality they bear with all the softness.” By working with textiles, Cow taps into a lineage of women’s craft, searching for the indigenous knowledge that should have been hers to inherit.

Ben Stanwix & Xhanti Zwelendaba

Gallery: Reservoir

Unlike Cow’s work, this piece invites the viewer to step back to fully grasp its scale. Winner of the Investec Emerging Artist Award, this expansive 4.4-meter-wide artwork is composed of over 1,800 textile swatches.

At first glance, the pixelated field of colour appears abstract. But from a distance, a scene emerges of a church congregation. A white missionary priest elevated on a pedestal, a Black translator, and a Black congregation. The work references a 1986 postage stamp, though the scene it depicts is from Bophuthatswana (modern-day Lesotho) in the 1830s.

Reservoir co-director Heinrich Groenewald says:“It speaks about the idea of looking at history through different lenses. When this image came out, it was on a postage stamp. These things functioned as propaganda at the time… promoting evangelism of Christianity as this positive thing. Today we look at that same image and we think about it as the erasure of cultural identity and of a history.”

 

The work physically demands a shift in perspective, emphasising that history is not fixed – it is constructed and reconstructed in different, often strategic ways. The swatches, row after row sewn together, were sourced from personal and collective histories – fabrics handed down by the artists’ parents, and textiles gathered from fabric stores across Woodstock. These swatches, previously intended for clothing or furniture, once again represent a re-contextualisation.

Bulumko Mbete

Gallery: Reservoir

Bulumko Mbete’s work is coloured by natural dyes, mostly using plants with medicinal properties. Heinrich speaks of the feminist undertones in this work – Bulumko views the role of women as healers, and holders of generational knowledge around medicine and plants.

 

Once dyed, the cloth is adorned with beading. To Bulumko, beading functions not just as decoration but as a space where stories are archived. Beading, typically done by women, provides a space where women come together for hours, days, and even months to complete projects together – providing a space where women can sit, gather, and speak.

Michaela Younge

Gallery: SMAC

Michaela Younge uses the creative freedom of her medium to her full ability. Unlike the more traditional textile techniques of weaving or beading, which impose strict structural limitations, felting offers fluidity – enabling organic shapes and intricate details. And nothing captures that unbridled creativity quite like the Grim Reaper clutching a pink Stanley cup.

Using merino wool, Younge crafts vivid, whimsical worlds brimming with hedonism and dark humour. Her personality is embedded in every piece, injecting a quirky irreverence into the art fair’s presentation.

But don’t let the playfulness fool you – felting is meticulous, labour-intensive work. It requires jabbing fine, jagged needles into wool repeatedly, knotting the fibres together. Stand a little closer, and you’ll see evidence of this painstaking process – hundreds of pricks where her needles have built up layer upon layer of colour.

Soukaina Joual

Gallery: Spiaggia Libera

Soukaina Joual’s work begins with fragmented female limbs – paper collages that suggest new, impossible ways of existing. Upon closer inspection, the figures she constructs cannot be real: three legs, a single arm, no head or torso. As gallerist Sacha Guedj-Cohen says, “There is something a bit unsettling [about her work]; the mind has this habit of trying to understand the logic of it… There is an impossibility of being, and it is also a reflection of the impossibility of being in the female body in our society today.”

Her small-scale embroideries are stitched onto doilies, passed on from relatives and acquaintances. These inherited textiles represent the work of an older generation in Morocco. By making these textiles the foundation of her work, Soukaina extends their legacy, weaving past traditions into contemporary expression.

While the paper collages Soukaina begins with appear grotesque, their impact is transformed by the fine black lines of detailed embroidery on lacy doilies and napkins. The scale of this work creates an intimate viewing experience. In order to view the work, one must stand close, close enough to see the white lace borders and delicate hand embroidery. Through embroidery, these impossible bodies transition from anatomical misunderstandings to graceful, soft forms.

Charlene Komuntale

Gallery: Afriart Gallery

Charlene Komuntale’s work begins with the corset – historically restrictive, yet simultaneously a tool to take up space in a time when women were otherwise unseen. She adorns these forms with intricate beading, embroidery, layered fabrics, and digital paintings, transforming them into rich, textural statements. These techniques, traditionally dismissed as “women’s labour,” are central to her work, reclaiming and elevating practices that have long been undervalued.

When asked about the significance of embroidery, beading, and sewing within a space like the Art Fair, she says: “It is everything… My work centres not only on my life, but the women around me. It is necessary that we are seen, and heard, and valued – especially now. I think Africa’s at a point of transitioning, and it’s necessary that there is representation not only for women, but also women of colour, and it’s wonderful for me to do it so well that it grabs the attention of everyone.”

How fitting that these transformed corsets now serve as Komuntale’s way of taking up space – echoing history where corsets once helped women assert their presence in a world that sought to contain them.

Bubu Ogisi & Mbali Dhlamini

Gallery: 16by16

Weaving Across Borders is a long-term collaboration between Bubu Ogisi and Mbali Dhlamini, bridging Nigeria and South Africa through a shared commitment to indigenous textile traditions. The project moves between material research and artistic exploration, foregrounding African craft practices while reinterpreting them through contemporary lenses.

Bubu, Creative Director of IAMISIGO, showcases her textile talents through woven pieces. One, an interweaving of various natural fibres, while another, in translucent blue plastic, contrasts the variety of traditional materials with the permanence of synthetic ones. Similarly to Cow Mash, these material choices speak to an evolving relationship with craft – one that acknowledges historical techniques and modern realities.

The collaborative pieces extend this dialogue further. Woven from recycled T-shirts, indigo-dyed threads, and sheep’s wool, the three textiles depict women from West African archives, their faces intentionally blacked out. This is a recurring technique in Mbali’s work, challenging the colonial gaze by reclaiming anonymity for the subjects.

By threading together histories, processes, and geographies, Weaving Across Borders challenges conventional divisions between craft and art, reaffirming textiles as vessels of cultural memory and resistance.

Amy Rusch

Gallery: Suburbia Contemporary

Using recycled plastic as her canvas, Amy Rusch works into the thin layers with embroidery, transforming it into a textile of its own using a machine and hand stitching.

Though her larger works are machine-stitched, they are built up section by section. Akin to the pin-pricks of Younge’s felting, the slight shifts in tension between each section reveal the presence of the maker. The process remains physically involved – you cannot separate the machine from the one operating it. People underestimate how physical the process of sewing or weaving is even when using a machine, but the operator guides each movement, each mark.

Any’s distinctive line work is informed by the movement of the wind. Amy will leave her pieces in an area to catch wind, and then let the creases inform her mark making. Kim Karabo Makin of Suburbia Contemporary describes this work as “an image that captures a performance”, preserving the interaction between her materials and the environment.

Kim speaks on the tactile nature of Rusch’s work, and how inviting these textile works can be: “I quite often see people go really close… Personally, I’m really interested in works with textiles – I’m more interested in sculptures and things that make you want to touch them, even though you’re not supposed to… I enjoy art that can create an experience.”

NURU Showroom

The expressive embroidery of Daisie Jo, the sculptural mastery of Viviers Studio, the undeniable drama of a Crystal Birch hat – it only feels right to see these pieces exhibited among artworks. NURU disrupts the usual distance between artwork and viewer, inserting fashion into the gallery space and hence, transforming it.

NURU Showroom dissolves the boundaries between fashion, design, and art, offering a space where these disciplines merge seamlessly. Collaboration was at the heart of the presentation, with pieces from different designers layered together in dynamic conversation. To name a few, the booth showcased works by IAMISIGO, Seven, Frances V.H. Mohair, Bare Home Decor, and Cape Cobra. Founded on the pillars of respect, unity, and sustainability, NURU fosters an environment where these designers can share resources, expertise, and ideas, prioritising collaboration over competition.

Textile Tensions

Textile works encourage intimacy, causing tension between the artwork and the viewer. Unlike paintings or photographs – firmly placed behind glass or at a polite distance – we encounter textiles constantly in daily life. We are used to feeling their warmth, their softness, their presence. Seeing them in the context of an art fair disrupts this instinct. We want to reach out – to feel the hard stiffness of machine embroidery, the glossy bumps of beadwork, the comforting density of a tufted wall hanging – but we must hold ourselves back.

This paradox is one aspect of what makes textiles so compelling in an art space. They exist between the familiar and the forbidden, drawing us in with the promise of texture, history, and labour woven into every thread. This attraction is not limited to Cape Town, as we see textile art increasing in popularity worldwide. At the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, these works did more than just hang on the walls – they invited conversation, challenged expectations, and proved that textiles belong not just in our homes and wardrobes, but at the heart of contemporary art.

 

• All photos by P. Smith Photography
• A massive thank you to the artists and gallery representatives who shared their time and expertise with me: Nani Mntonintshi (Ebony Curated), Delara Crouse (Berman Contemporary All Women Art), Heinrich Groenewald (Reservoir), Sascha Goedj-Cohen (Spiaggia Libera), Lisa Thompson (SMAC Gallery), Cow Mash (Berman Contemporary All Women Art), Kim Karabo Makin (Suburbia Contemporary), Tushar Hathiramani (16 by 16) and Charlene Komuntale (Afriart Gallery).