Touchlines: The Delicate Boundaries of Care and Cloth

'Touchlines' was a curated exhibition developed for the 1912 Mill at Sunny Bank Mills, bringing together members of the 62 Group of Textile Artists in response to a thematic brief exploring care, intimacy, repair, and community through contemporary textile practice. Conceived and curated by Claire Barber, the exhibition employed the notion of the "touchline" as both a literal and metaphorical framework through which artists could examine points of connection, separation, vulnerability, and resilience.
Drawing upon the touchline as the boundary marking the edge of play in sport, the project expanded the term to consider the emotional, material, and social edges that shape human relationships and textile making. The curatorial framework invited artists to explore cloth as a conduit of touch and care, to reflect upon acts of repair and mending, and to examine how labour, heritage, and embodied knowledge become embedded within textile processes. The exhibition further responded to the historical context of Sunny Bank Mills, where textile production, community identity, and sporting culture were deeply interconnected.

Presented during the Threads Textile Festival, Touchlines brought together diverse approaches to materiality, scale, and technique, ranging from intimate hand-crafted works to large-scale installations responding directly to the industrial architecture of the Mill. Through the development of the exhibition brief, artist selection, spatial curation, and installation, the project positioned contemporary textile practice as a site through which questions of care, belonging, maintenance, and collective resilience could be explored. The exhibition demonstrated how curatorial practice can function as a form of research, generating dialogue between place, material, history, and contemporary social experience.