EXHIBITION: Songs of Cloth – part of OUR TURN

1st Nov 2025 - 16th Nov 2025
11:00 am - 4:00 pm

Ilkley Manor House is proud to be partnering with OUR TURN – Bradford Visual Arts Festival from 1 to 16 November.

A quiet gathering of textiles by Hannah Lamb, Annie Fforde, Sarah Gamble, Pippa Hamilton and Lorna Jewitt. Here, process – stitch, dye, imprint, surface – becomes a way to hold memory and touch. Works move from small, attentive gestures to material-led installation, inviting close looking and slow time.

Annie Fforde’s Fabric of Memory premieres as one of this year’s OUR TURN Festival commissions. Annie is a printmaker of more than two decades, combining traditional and experimental methods. Her process-led works layer colour, texture and printed fabric to evoke how memory is stored in cloth. She is also an experienced workshop leader, championing inclusive, exploratory print.

Hannah Lamb works across stitch, print and fabric manipulation, from intimate pieces to site-responsive installations. Her practice often draws on archives and the textile histories of West Yorkshire, with projects at Salts Mill, Bradford Textile Archive, Sunny Bank Mills, 509 Arts, and the Brontë Parsonage Museum. She authored Poetic Cloth: Creating Meaning in Textile Art (2019) and her second book Unfolding Cloth: Inspiration from Historical Textiles will be released in 2025 (both published by Batsford). Her works include:

• Inheritance – A meditation on how knowledge accumulates through making and unmaking; thousands of small actions that become a language in the hands.
• Incomplete Histories – prompted by 18th–19th-century printers’ and dyers’ notebooks, the work traces fragments – recipes, swatches, copperplate instructions – towards wider narratives of trade, extraction and unequal exchange. It asks us to question the origins of cloth, then and now.
• At Home – made during the Covid-19 lockdown, the work considered the pandemic’s blurred boundaries; soft florals and quilted comfort held by bound threads – home as shelter and, sometimes, confinement.
• Accretion (reworked)  – accretion, n.: growth by gradual accumulation. This piece honours the many hands Lamb has learned from – the careful turn of cloth; the quick, dancing gestures when materials spark. We learn by making, but first by watching: how others hold, show and speak through textiles. Over time, those observed movements layer with our own experience, becoming muscle memory and a personal grammar of cloth.

Sarah Gamble, Pippa Hamilton, and Lorna Jewitt are collaborating in stitch. DRIFT grows through passing works between hands, each artist responding in turn. From minute, precise stitches to densely layered cloth, the pieces carry individual voices while bearing the imprint of shared making. Alongside joint works, individual pieces appear on fabric and paper.

Sarah Gamble’s practice centres on textiles, print and stitch; her work has been shown nationally.

Lorna Jewitt, informed by almost a decade working with archives, draws on conservation and the lives of kept objects; stitch and textiles are her chosen mediums.

Pippa Hamilton works in textile and mixed media, observing constructed and natural landscapes through photography and sketch. A textiles graduate of Ilkley College, she later taught in secondary education and lectured at Leeds Metropolitan University.

Curated by Andreea Chitan – visual artist and curator.

OUR TURN is designed and led by artists and delivered by South Square Centre in collaboration with Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, Yorkshire Contemporary and Bradford Producing Hub. The festival is supported by Arts Council England, Yorkshire Visual Arts Network and commissioned by Bradford 2025. Click here to learn more.

 

Accessibility Information
The exhibition runs on weekends, 11am to 4pm, from 1 to 16 November. Entry is free unless stated otherwise; no booking is required. Please check the website and our social media for the latest updates before visiting.

Please note this exhibition takes place upstairs in the Western Gallery, accessible via a staircase of 18 steps.

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