Painted Garments; Conversations between Painting, Fashion and Texiles, London (2026)
A one-day creative symposium co-convened by Dr Tom Cardwell and Dr Sarah Kate Wilson, both Senior Lecturers of BA (Hons) Fine Art: Painting at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL.
Friday 22 May 2026. The Hub, Camberwell College of Arts, 42 Bonar Road, London SE15 5FB
Keynotes:
Delaine Le Bas - Artist, Performance and QnA
Dr Rosalind McKever - Curator of Paintings and Drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London A frock From Schiaparelli Ranks Like A Modern Canvas
Painted Garments; Conversations between Painting, Fashion and Textiles.
Papers
Dr Timea Andrea Lelik, Dressed to Resist: Dress, Authority, and Female Sovereignty in Leonor Fini’s Painted Garments
Dr Craig Staff, Making Soft: The Zipper Paintings of Karen Carson
Prof Marian Mazzone, Pattern Thinking: Garment, Image, and Computational Form
Dr Helen Westgeest, Painted Garments as Shehzil Malik’s Medium forFeminist Activism
Keidra Daniels Navaroli, “Swagga Like Us:” Clothing, Culture, and Rhetoric in the Fiber Portraits of Kandy G. Lopez
Caroline Herma, Embroidered Illusions: Painted Copes as Image Carriers between Textile Materiality and Corporeality in Late Medieval Panel Painting
The Neo Naturists, Body Paint is the Ultimate Painted Garment
Amrita Dhallu, We Live in Clothes, We Live in Buildings - Do They Fit Us?
Dr Anne Reimers, Dressed in Paint: Time, Labour, and Materiality in Paint-Stained Artists' Dress and Luxury Fashion
The event was supported by the CCW, Staff Research Fund, UAL.
The symposium selected speakers though an Open Call in relation to (but not limited to) the themes listed below. In Spring 2027 Tom Cardwell and I will guest edit a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Painting (Intellect) we have an open call for these papers currently, click here.
- The relationship between painting and the material, symbolic and cultural functions of clothing
- How painted garments and textiles might give voice to racial, social and/or environmental injustices
- Critical and theoretical interpretations of the intersections between the mediums
- The role of painted garments and textiles as forms of resistance
- Wearable paintings/paintings as garments
- Fashion items translated from paintings
- Artists working directly onto garments and textiles
- Explorations of identity through the intersection of painting, textiles and fashion
- Textiles and fashion as subjects for painting
- Art/fashion histories approach to painting