The new book spotlights Beck’s woven explorations of urban decay, fragility, and repair alongside 44 artists reshaping contemporary textile art.
A new publication by Thames & Hudson, Textiles x Art: How Textiles Are Shaping Contemporary Art, features Professor Kim Beck among leading artists whose practices are redefining the role of fiber in contemporary art. Written by Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson, the book examines why textiles have become a powerful site for storytelling, resistance, and material innovation, tracing how artists use historically domestic techniques to engage with urgent global themes.
Within this context, the authors highlight Beck’s focus on “everyday disaster,” the quiet signs of instability and neglect that surface in the built environment. They describe how she works through processes of documentation and transformation, weaving photographs, rubbings, and impressions of cracked asphalt and broken ground into sculptural pieces that function as both record and repair. By translating urban surfaces into large-scale woven forms and incorporating materials gathered from the landscape, Beck creates alternative topographies that reveal the beauty and precarity of place.