Tamworth Textile Triennial
The Tamworth Regional Gallery is renowned for our Tamworth Textile Triennial.
The Triennial, held every three years, showcases the best of textile art from across the country, attracting artist participation from all states in Australia, wide audiences and critical review. The Triennial also assists to continue the development of our textile collection, as many works are purchased for the Tamworth Regional Gallery’s permanent collection.
Nature Machine: 6th Tamworth Textile Triennial
Nature Machine: 6th Tamworth Textile Triennial will open at Tamworth Regional Gallery on 19 September 2026 before touring nationally.
Tamworth Regional Gallery is proud to present Nature Machine: The 6th Tamworth Textile Triennial, a major national exhibition that showcases the vision and innovation of contemporary textile practice across Australia.
Curated by Blake Griffiths, Nature Machine brings together leading and emerging textile artists whose practices reflect the profound and often complex ways makers grapple with the complex relationship between hand, body and machine. With boldness and care, the exhibition asks: how can artists create in ways that sustain, rather than deplete, the materials and ecologies they work with? The artists of Nature Machine experiment with growing, harvesting, recycling, and reimagining textile resources, while others turn to the virtual, embracing artificial intelligence and machine production to explore and challenge the changing role of textiles in a technological age.
From permaculture to programming, each artist demonstrates how making can become a form of ecological stewardship; their material innovations and technical mastery revealing not only the ingenuity of Australian textile practice today but also, the deep responsibility artists feel toward the environments that sustain them.
The exhibition celebrates the diverse ways artists are responding to urgent environmental concerns, protecting traditions, revaluing craft knowledge, and proposing new ways of living with, and making from, the world around us.
Artists include:
Abdullah M. I. Syed | Alycia Bennett | Anita Johnson | Cara Johnson | Ellen Ferrier | Jackson Farley | Jacky Cheng | Jacqueline Stojanović | Janette Murrungun | Jennifer Robertson | Joseph E Burgess | Juanella Donovan | Juanita McLauchlan | Lauren Kerjan | Lucia Dohrmann | Margaret Woodward & Justy Phillips | Rebecca Mayo
Curator: Blake Griffiths
Bio: Blake Griffiths is a textile artist, curator, and arts leader whose practice draws on research, critical inquiry, and community engagement to explore how ‘textile thinking’ can shape contemporary art and culture. He is a Creative Resident at the Powerhouse Museum and Head of the La Perouse Museum where he leads work examining the entangled histories of Australia’s early colonial settlement and First Nations culture in NSW. Blake has worked with major collecting institutions both administratively and creatively and has exhibited widely, including recent exhibitions such as Radical Textiles, at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and his recent solo exhibition, Trading Cloth at the Wangaratta Art Gallery.
5th Textile Triennial
Residue + Response: Connecting histories and futuresSince the Tamworth Fibre Textile collection began in 1973 artists have interwoven and shared lived experiences and negotiated stories through the materiality of textile practice.
The 5th Tamworth Textile Triennial: Residue + Response: Connecting histories and futures builds on this tradition with a future focus on the intangible essence of what it means to be human in the fabric of today’s society and will be an opportunity to celebrate Australian textiles practice, for artists to create and explore the relationality and residues of change through a multiplicity of materials, methods and meanings.
Residue + Response: Connecting histories and futures builds on the tradition of the Tamworth Fibre Textile exhibitions which first began in 1973, showcasing 50 years of contemporary textile artists. There are few events in Australia that can demonstrate such a strong tradition of promoting and sustaining the unique cultural heritage associated with both the history and technology of textile practice.
Residue + Response: Connecting histories and futures, 5th Tamworth Textile Triennial is curated by Dr Carol McGregor an artist, curator, educator who lives and works in Meanjin (Brisbane).
TENSION(s): 4th Tamworth Textile Triennial
Performance, Interaction and Material Futures
Tamworth Textile Triennial showcases the best of textile art from across the country, attracting artist participation from all states in Australia. Tension(s) 2020: Tamworth Textile Triennial has been curated by Vic McEwan.
"Musical theory teaches us that as we change the tension that a material is under, we also change its pitch. It is through the combining of these various tensions that we are able to create a chord, a melody, a verse, a chorus. As the curator of Tension(s) 2020, I aim to take the various tones and pitches offered by the tension(s) these artists are exploring, and attempt to bring them together into a coherence of composition: a spatial and visual composition that is sometimes in unison, sometimes dissonant, sometimes sweet and melodic, and sometimes pure noise.
Tension(s) 2020 is a coming together that both reveals and conceals the artist, reveals and conceals the audience, and provokes us to actively remember that if there is one thing hindsight has taught us, it is that we risk danger whenever we draw meaning from only one perspective
Curator Vic McEwan.
