Textiles have a front and a back.
At least… that’s what we think.
In the exhibition Subtiel Textiel – voorbij de keerzijde at De Weverij in Evergem, that self-evident idea was thoroughly dismantled. Not only literally — by presenting works that can be viewed from multiple sides — but also mentally: how do we actually look at textiles, at art, at materials, at one another?
Curator and textile artist Lieve Vanmaele started from a simple yet sharp observation: we are used to looking at things from one side only. A painting has a front, a carpet has a “right” side, a room has a direction. But textiles resist that logic. They have structure, depth, permeability and tactility. They exist by virtue of layers.
And that became the starting point of this exhibition.
Space as fabric
Instead of opting for a classical display, Vanmaele chose a spatial intervention. Fine threads connected the works of six artists — Katrien Everaert, Trui Demarcke, Janne Gistelinck, Ina Hillewig, Mileen Malbrain and Hilde Windels — into a single whole. Not as decoration, but as a kind of architecture made of lines.
She described her role aptly as “subtly absent.”
The curator did not act as a director positioning artworks, but rather as a weaver making relationships visible. The exhibition was therefore not a collection of objects, but a field of tensions: light versus heavy, soft versus hard, nature versus technology, visible versus hidden.
Even sound had its place. Sound artist Eline Vanduyver (E_Mousai) created a soundscape built from recordings of weaving machines. The rhythm of labour, once purely functional, became audible as poetry — and at the same time as industry. Once again: two sides of the same reality.
Textile as thought, not technique
What stood out most was that none of the artists used textiles in a traditional way. It was hardly about clothing or decoration. It was about perception.
- Katrien Everaert explored grief and hope in layered works where sisal, paper and wax intersect. Her work reveals how emotions are never one-dimensional.
- Trui Demarcke worked around gravity: light and heavy appear not as opposites but as interconnected forces.
- Janne Gistelinck started from jacquard weaving and its binary code — the historical precursor of the computer — and intertwined images of body, landscape and technology into a new reality.
- Ina Hillewig used lint from worn clothing. Waste became memory: traces of bodies and time.
- Mileen Malbrain constructed a fictional laboratory in which iron wire and distorted yoghurt containers evoke new organisms — somewhere between plant and animal.
- Hilde Windels worked with flax as a skin between human and space, a material that captures light and makes architecture visible.
The common thread: textile was not merely a medium, but a way of thinking. It connected biology, technology, ecology and emotion.
Beyond the reverse side
The title turned out not to be a metaphor, but an invitation.
Walking around the works, it became clear that a back is never simply a back. Shadow became image. Transparency became form. What first appeared decorative gained meaning. Textile quite literally compelled the visitor to move — and to look differently.
And that may be the exhibition’s most important lesson:
textile is not about surface.
It is about relationships.
Between fibres.
Between materials.
Between people and space.
In an age in which we are used to scanning quickly and judging instantly, Subtiel Textiel reveals something strikingly contemporary: understanding only emerges when you dare to move around something — and examine its hidden side as well.
Or, as Oscar Wilde once put it, in a quote referenced in the exhibition:
“The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
Perhaps that is precisely what textiles have done for centuries: teach us that reality is woven, never flat.
And that looking is, in fact, a form of slow thinking.
You can read the full interview with curator Lieve Vanmaele on the De Weverij website.
