Through contemporary textiles from the Gallery's Australian, Asian and Pacific collections,

'Threads' celebrates contemporary artists who explore and extend the textile medium.

Transformed through knitting, weaving, looping and stitching, threads carry significant personal and cultural narratives. Many works from the exhibition draw on traditional textile practices while also engaging new technologies, materials and imagery to reflect and transform existing social, political and cultural conditions. Through striking designs, skilled techniques and richly textured surfaces of contemporary textiles, the exhibition investigates their function as a form of skin or interface with other cultures, the use of abstraction and rhythm to engage with local environments, the weaving of new histories and ideas of nation, and the continued vitality of garden imagery.

The exhibition includes a significant 22 metre long Tongan ngatu tā'uli (black bark-cloth) commissioned by the Gallery as one of several major new collection acquisitions to mark the 5th anniversary of the opening of GOMA.