Queer Materiality & Textiles Panel
The Constance Howard Gallery
30 Jan 2026
In conjunction with the archival exhibition Laundry Day, this panel brings together Marf Summers, Emily Witham, and Ruby Hodgson to discuss the queer potential of textiles and material practice. Drawing on leather, felt, fashion, and archival materials, the speakers consider how matter carries histories of desire, class, labour, and belonging. The discussion moves between the domestic, the personal and the political. It asks how textiles can hold memory, produce relations, and shape queer art, identity and community.
"Artist and poet Dee Light began creating feltwork embroideries while studying for a BA in Textiles at Goldsmiths in the 1980s. Her work is playful and surprising, transforming the domestic sphere through a distinctive and imaginative lens.
Light wrote about living between worlds, describing a sense of not fully belonging to either the Black or white communities around her. Raised across mixed cultures, and identifying as queer and disabled, her experiences of mental health and her search for belonging are woven throughout her artworks and poetry. Her artworks here, created
while she was a student, form a softer world in which the inanimate is brought to life and the familiar is rendered strange."
Text by Ruby Hodgson, Curator of Goldsmiths Textile Collection
About
The Textile Collection & Constance Howard Gallery is a centre dedicated to multidisciplinary textiles research, and is home to the Goldsmiths Textile Collection.
The Collection, founded in the 1980s by Constance Howard and Audrey Walker, comprises textile art, embroidery and dress from all continents. Our global collection is complemented with a variety of teaching materials and archives, including technical and experimental samples and Constance Howard's own teaching archive.
Dee Light as she started to call herself in the early nineties, was a gifted embroiderer, performance artist and poet, who studied Textiles at Goldsmiths from 1985 to 1989.
Written by Helen Carr, Emeritus Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and member of the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles Advisory Board, Goldsmiths
Ruby Hodgson is the Curator of the Goldsmiths Textile Collection and the Curatorial Operations Coordinator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her research centres on constructions of class and gender through fashion, and the emotional embodiment of textiles. Her chapter, “Robe à la Grand-Mère: The Reuse of Eighteenth-Century Silks in Romantic-Era Fashion,” appears in Reading the Thread: Cloth and Communication (Bloomsbury Academic). She was a contributor to Silk: Fiber, Fabric, and Fashion (Thames & Hudson).
rubyjhodgson
Marf Summers
Marf Summers (b. 1991, UK) is an artist, architect, and leatherworker, living and working in London. Their work explores themes of trans & dyke identity, domesticity, and class, working in diverse mediums including leather, sandpaper, silicone and hard candy. Marf creates primarily 3 dimensional and object works that turn a subversive and eroticising eye on the mundane through butch-camp sensibilities. Their current body of work ‘Standing Stone Butch’ collides the unknowable landscape of prehistory with 20th century constructs of queer identity, exploring themes of folklore, myth, and petrification. Marf’s work has been exhibited internationally and they are currently a member of the Conditions Studio Programme in Croydon, South London.
marfsummers
Emily Witham
Emily Witham (b. 1994, Edinburgh) is an artist based in South London. Referencing both archives and personal experience, her work explores the history of dyke subcultures and contemporary lesbian politics. She is particularly interested in the legacy of working-class butch/femme identities and queer community spaces. She has exhibited at Barbican Curve Gallery and Southbank Centre, as well as at Golden Thread Gallery (Belfast), Space Station Sixty-Five, Treadgolds (Portsmouth), and Modebelofte (Eindhoven) for Dutch Design Week. Witham has a background in fashion. She previously worked at House of Holland and has designed outfits under her own label for the cast of Ru Paul’s Drag Race UK, Olly Alexander, Little Mix, and Kate Nash. More recently, Witham was published in the 2024 Guardian Book of the Year, The Night Alphabet by Joelle Taylor, for which she produced a series of twelve full-page artworks. She is the founder of The London Dyke Market, is named on DIVA Magazine’s 2025 Power List, and was awarded second place for the 2025 Queer Britain Art Award.
withamemily
Dates and Times
30 January 2026
Fri 6:30-8pm
Location
The Constance Howard Gallery,
Lower Floor, Deptford Town Hall,
SE14 6NW
