Boston has its exhibitions on art from fabric and fibre; London also has exhibitions on art using these and other materials, both natural and artificial, with the work of the American artist, Richard Tuttle at the Whitechapel Gallery and Tate Modern.

The Whitechapel Gallery has an exhibition on Richard Tuttle’s work using fibre, thread and fabrics over the last 40 years. In  I Don’t Know. The Weave of Textile Language. Tuttle has acted as his own curator and has placed the works in a relationship with each other and the architecture of Whitechapel Gallery’s, weaving colour, line and movement through the exhibition.

Running in parallel is a newly commissioned sculpture in the monumental Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in Bankside. It is good to see this space used again for major installations on a scale which very few galleries can accommodate.  This commission comes ahead of the major new partnership between Tate Modern and Hyundai Motor which will facilitate a new series of site-specific installations by contemporary artists, beginning in autumn 2015.

The new fabric sculpture hanging in the Turbine Hall  is the largest work ever created by Tuttle, at over 12 metres high.  With fabrics as colourful as those in Asia, the sculpture is suspended from the ceiling like a large aeronautical structure draped over with the brightly-coloured  fabrics.  It is fun and enjoyable, a celebration of what can be done with a variety of fabrics, but what does it mean?