SUE MALVERN

Sue Malvern is an art weaver. Her work explores the idea of weaving as a metaphor for migration, how crossing borders merges and shifts identities. She’s interested in how these concepts find form in woven work, in the materials used, the structure of the weave and the imagery evoked. She mostly weaves two dimensional wall hangings. She has made work about the politics of cotton in Lancashire and India, as well as a project addressing the crisis of the Channel crossings. She is currently developing new works that further explore cloth as a cultural paradigm for migration, especially the textile as a portable form of cultural expression.

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After graduating in Fine Art, Sue Malvern completed a doctorate in History of Art. She worked as an associate professor at Reading University in art history and published on art and conflict, contemporary art and feminism. Sue learned to weave in 2015 completing her Diploma in Handweaving with distinction in 2019. She brings her long-standing expertise as a writer on contemporary art to bear on the development of her weaving. She mostly weaves on Dobby looms, recently acquiring a 32 shaft compu-Dobby. But she also weaves on a small four shaft loom, as well as experimenting with off-loom weaving techniques. Most of her work uses cotton, linen, silk and paper yarns, some of which she dyes, and she often experiments with supplementary warps and hand-manipulated techniques.

 

Sue Malvern organised the group exhibition ‘From Edge to Edge’ at the Handweavers Studio and Gallery, London, 2022, which travelled to the Køng Museums Væve- og Spindeskole, Denmark. She organised the group exhibition for Seven Sisters Handweavers, held at Whitchurch Silk Mill, 2024. She has completed Artists Residencies at Jelly Arts, Reading, in 2023 and at the Icelandic Textile Research Centre, Blönduós in 2024. She is an associate artist at Jelly Arts. She contributed a work to Jelly’s Open for Art festival in 2024, displaying a hanging woven from hand-dyed paper yarns at a public location in the town centre. She has written and given talks on textiles but relishes spending most of her time on the practical work of weaving. She is currently planning for a new public commission, and is curating a large-scale textile exhibition in London, 2025.