Square Correlation No 51999. Courtesy Bolton Art Gallery

Kay Carson looks at the harder side of textile art at Bolton Art Gallery.

Textile art is transformed into minimalist sculpture in Sensual Austerity, a new exhibition at Bolton Art Gallery.

Maxine Bristow’s showcase, running from September 23 until November 1, 2006, uncovers the multiple personalities and emotional currency attached to cloth.

It takes hours, days, weeks and months of sheer toil, but the end results could justifiably stand alongside Robert Ryman or even Dan Flavin in terms of its uniformity and its silent rhythm.

“There are two contexts to the work: the genre of minimalism - and just plain sewing,” says Bristow.

The Bolton-born artist and designer has drawn not only upon her own background of textiles, with sewing skills passed down from her grandmother, but the North West as a whole, with its history of cotton mills and factories.

Darn ref no 648. Courtesy Bolton Art Gallery

Her work comprises needlework, darning and buttonholes, “evocative of the make-do-and-mend philosophy”. When put like that, it’s no wonder Bristow has wanted to cut loose from this stereotype. “Needlework is so tied up with the notion of utility as opposed to art for art’s sake. It’s the reason textiles have been so marginalized within the canon of fine art,” she says.

Strangely, though, Bristow doesn’t give her pieces names, as such; instead, they are given perfunctory labels such as 18 x 51 over 11.44 (more than a dozen wall hangings in cool beige punctuated with buttonholes), or Square Correlation No 51999 (a warm, honey-coloured piece, again bedecked with her signature buttonhole motif).

Numbers rather than words: less emotive? The Jerwood Prize nominee’s naming convention is a further testament to the minimalist ethos - or, rather, her subversion of it, by presenting something which looks like one thing and says another.

For something as flowing as fabric, it is alarming to see it presented angularly. There is, as Bristow puts it, “that sense of repetition, of order - like the bricks of Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (1966).”

156 Down 6 Side Seams. Courtesy Bolton Art Gallery

Yet her subtext of feeling cries out. “We have a special relationship with cloth,” she says. “It’s the first thing we are wrapped in when we’re born and it follows us to our graves.”

We can almost imagine how it feels without touching it. That said, there is a lot of quilting which looks soft but is quite harsh to the touch. Bristow explains she primed it with gesso, as you would a canvas, then manipulated the cloth to crack the surface and create texture.

Not an easy task, or a quick one. But she likens her “laborious” efforts to the old days where women did toil over such crafts. To complete the designs for this exhibition took her from November to July, working only weekends and resting purely on Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year and Easter Sunday.

She even had a formula for each one. “I’d look at the fabric, then calculate how long the pattern would take so I could plan a timetable. I’d think, ‘Well, that one works out at 88 buttonholes a day’,” she laughs.

Barrier units - Darn ref no 648. Courtesy Bolton Art Gallery

Bristow’s Barrier units - Darn ref no 648 (2005) looks at repetition from another angle: the way in which we are unconsciously guided by fences and boundaries in our everyday lives, and the number of times we touch handles and handrails, the same action, over and over again, without even thinking about it.

“These barriers are transition points between realms of space. Space is culturally loaded, the public versus the private, where we have access and where we don’t,” says Bristow.

“The domestic, private scene has historically been regarded as being of lesser value than the public sphere and I am taking it and putting in the public domain.”

She feels her message is not overtly political, but does nod to feminism. I would say the feminine as much as the feminist; her tightly darned bands around the barricades are reminiscent of the iron fist in a velvet glove. The fencing can certainly be seen as more guiding than forbidding. Bristow agrees: “They could be seen as barriers but also as supports.”

It is this soft-yet-strong undertone which makes a fitting epithet for women everywhere.