Thread and Prejudice: On Fibre Art, Hierarchies, and Who Gets to Decide

A Question I Keep Coming Back To

Here is something I find genuinely puzzling.

In the 16th century, the tapestries produced at the great European workshops — Gobelin, Bruges, Brussels — were considered among the most prestigious art objects in the world. Kings commissioned them. They hung in the grandest rooms in Europe. They depicted the same subjects as the paintings of the period — mythology, history, allegory — and they were valued accordingly. A great tapestry cost more than a great painting.

Somewhere between then and now, that changed entirely.

Today, fibre and textile work sits near the bottom of the art world's informal hierarchy — below painting, below sculpture, below photography, often categorised not as art at all but as craft. The same medium that once adorned the palaces of Europe is now, in many institutional contexts, considered a lesser form of making.

I've been trying to understand how that happened. And the more I look at it, the more I think the answer has less to do with the work itself than with who, over the centuries, has been doing it.

When It Became Women's Work

The shift is not difficult to trace historically, even if it's uncomfortable to sit with.

As textile production industrialised through the 18th and 19th centuries, the hand-making of cloth and fibre moved increasingly into the domestic sphere — into the home, into the hands of women. Weaving, embroidery, quilting, needlework: these became the textile arts of women's daily life. They were practised in private, rarely signed, seldom exhibited, and almost never collected in the way that paintings and sculptures were collected.

At the same time, the institutions that defined what counted as "fine art" — the academies, the salons, the galleries — were almost exclusively male in their membership and their tastes. They valued what they made and what they understood. And what they made was, predominantly, painting and sculpture.

The result was a hierarchy that encoded gender bias as aesthetic judgement. Work associated with women's domestic labour was classified as craft. Work associated with male artistic ambition was classified as art. The distinction was presented as being about skill, or conceptual depth, or cultural significance — but I'm not sure it was really about any of those things. I think it was about who held the power to decide.

That's not a comfortable thing to say. But I find it hard to look at the history and reach a different conclusion.

What It Feels Like From the Inside

I work in felted merino wool. I make large-scale works that take months to complete. The process is physically demanding, technically complex, and conceptually driven — every piece begins with an idea, an emotional territory I want to explore, and the material is the means by which I explore it.

And yet. There are gatekeepers to the high end of the art world — gallerists, curators, collectors — for whom the word "fibre" or "textile" seems to trigger an almost automatic recalibration of how seriously they take the work. It happens regularly. I've learned to recognise it: a slight shift in register, a question about whether the work is "decorative," an assumption about audience or price point that wouldn't be made about a painting of equivalent scale and ambition.

I don't say this with any particular agenda. I say it because I think it's worth naming honestly, and because I suspect I'm far from alone in experiencing it.

The question I find myself asking is: is this changing? And if so, how fast?

The Signs That Something Is Shifting

There are genuine reasons for optimism, I think.

The artists I wrote about recently — Abakanowicz, Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks, Faith Ringgold — have all, in different ways and over long careers, forced the art world to take fibre seriously on its own terms. Their institutional recognition matters, even if it came slowly and often required them to work twice as hard as their peers in other mediums.

More broadly, there's a growing critical conversation about whose work has historically been valued and why. The feminist art history of the 1970s and 80s — writers like Rozsika Parker, whose book The Subversive Stitch traced exactly the history I've been describing here — laid important groundwork that is now filtering into mainstream curatorial thinking.

Major museums are acquiring more textile and fibre work. Some galleries that would previously have dismissed the medium are beginning to show it. The collector base is slowly broadening.

But I want to be honest: the shift feels slow from where I'm standing. The old hierarchies are stubborn. And I'm not sure the art world has fully reckoned with the gendered history that produced them — or with what it would mean to genuinely dismantle them, rather than simply making occasional exceptions for individual artists who manage to break through.

An Open Question

I'm curious what others think — particularly those who work in fibre and textiles, or who collect or engage with the medium seriously.

Do you feel the characterisation is changing? Are you encountering different attitudes than you did five or ten years ago? Or does the craft/art distinction still operate in the spaces you move through?

And for those outside the medium — does the word "textile" change how you think about a work? I'd genuinely like to know.

This isn't a simple question, and I don't have a tidy answer. But I think it's worth asking — because the history behind it matters, and because the artists still navigating it deserve a more honest conversation than the art world has typically been willing to have.

You can see Jacqui's large-scale fibre art works in Jac Fink Originals.