About

Join The London Library’s regular Art/Lit Salon for chat, discussion, drinks and thought-provocation, exploring art, literature and where the two forms collide. This time we’re delighted to be joining forces with London Craft Week to bring you a discussion about how textile art and craft intersects with culture, politics and cultural identity.

Salon host, writer/artist/curator Dominique Heyse-Moore is joined by artist and writer Himali Singh Soin, whose work with Hylozoic/Desires is currently the Art Now installation at Tate Britain, and Wells Fray-Smith, who recently curated Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican. Together, they’ll discuss what textiles and textile art can tell us about ourselves and the world we live in.

In the spirit of the salon, there will be time for drinks and conversation before and after the talk.

Wells Fray-Smith is a curator at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, where she co-curated Noah Davis (2025) and Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art(2024). She was formerly the Curator: Special Projects at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, where she ran the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Previous exhibitions include Emma Talbot: The Age (2022), The London Open (2022), and Helen Cammock: Che si può fare (2019). She has held similar positions at Pace Gallery and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She works across text, performance and moving image, using metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies and think through ecological loss, and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love. Her speculations are performed in audio-visual, immersive environments. She is one half of artist duo Hylozoic/Desires with David Soin Tappeser.

Dominique Heyse-Moore is a writer, artist, and Senior Curator of British Contemporary Art at Tate Britain, where she recently curated the Sarah Lucas exhibition Happy Gas and Art Now: Hylozoic/Desires. She was on The London Library Emerging Writers Programme 21/22, where she worked on a triptych of graphic memoirs exploring the legacy of empire and her own family’s heritage, which spans Africa, China, the Caribbean, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.