What happens when contemporary textile artists take over one of the grandest Elizabethan houses in Britain? That’s the question at the heart of Material Power: Rewoven, a new exhibition staged across the state rooms and chambers of Hardwick Hall, curated and creative produced by Devanshi Rungta in collaboration with the National Trust.
Hardwick Hall, in Derbyshire, is best known for its formidable founder Bess of Hardwick and the astonishing array of textiles that line its interiors — tapestries, embroideries, needlework all layered in historical power-play. But this isn’t a show about preserving the past. This is about talking back to it.
Sixteen contemporary artists and collectives have been invited to respond to the house and its collection, and the results are compelling — sometimes gentle, sometimes jarring, always deeply considered. We get tufted sculptures suspended in mid-air, embroidered wounds stitched into domestic linen, coded patterns that read like ancestral ghosts. There are moments of subtle disruption and others that go in hard on the politics of gender, class, empire, and memory.
This isn’t soft work. This is thread used as protest, as storytelling, as refusal.
There’s a long tradition of women’s labour being stitched over — literally and figuratively — in heritage narratives, and Material Power: Rewoven doesn’t let that slide. Instead, it leans into the idea that textiles have always been political. Curator Devanshi Rungta has taken that tension and run with it, asking not just what cloth can remember, but also: what has it been made to forget?
Some of the works speak to personal grief and healing. Others explore diasporic loss, ancestral fragmentation, or the quiet fury of domestic invisibility. Artists like Ayah Haider, Debbie Lawson, Sarah-Joy Ford, and Anna Perach bring their practices into rooms once defined by dynastic ambition and controlled beauty. The juxtaposition is what makes it work — ornate Elizabethan ceilings meet neon stitching, felted forms lean into centuries-old paneling, and suddenly history feels a little less remote.
The show flows across the Hall’s grand state rooms and private chambers — strategically placed, but never overly precious. In one corner, you’ll find digitally stitched braids referencing female-coded labour; in another, a felted cascade that spills across the floor like memory in motion. Rungta’s spatial decisions refuse to treat the artworks as decoration. Instead, they pose each piece as a kind of interruption — an invitation to re-read the house itself.
Why Now?
It’s timely. The National Trust is mid-pivot with a new strategy (People and Nature Thriving, launched Jan 2025) that names “ending unequal access to history” as one of its core ambitions — and exhibitions like this suggest they’re starting to mean it. Material Power: Rewoven forms part of the Trust’s Woven Worlds initiative, a wider exploration of how textiles can hold memory and community voice, especially when read against places shaped by wealth and exclusion.
In that context, a show like this doesn’t just tick a diversity box — it reconfigures the lens. It says: heritage isn’t static. It can hold contradictions. It can be questioned, rethreaded, re-spun.
Water Clock (2020)
The Curator Behind It
Rungta herself is one to watch. Roots in India and now based in the UK, her practice spans museum intervention, exhibition design, and community-led curation. Her work often centres material culture, oral history, and site-based storytelling—especially through the lens of underrepresented voices. The common thread? A quiet insistence that every space—whether a stately home or a city street—holds contested narratives waiting to be heard.
Rungta’s artistic work is driven by a core concern: how people express and explore identity through creative means. Whether in a former army hospital, a school building, a gallery, or a historic country house, her exhibitions build dialogues between space, material, and personal narrative.
She has developed a distinct practice that moves fluidly between institutions and communities—working with collections, artists, and audiences to explore how identity, femininity, and memory take shape through artistic form. Her interest lies not in spectacle, but in nuance: how a gesture, a textile, or a fragment of history can offer a language for the self.
For Material Power: Rewoven, Rungta collaborated closely with National Trust Hardwick Property curator Liz Waring over six months to bring 16 artists into Hardwick Hall—not to decorate its rooms, but to challenge how they are read. The resulting exhibition places contemporary textile works in conversation with themes of gender, legacy, and material power, asking visitors to reconsider who heritage spaces speak for—and who they often leave out.
Her past work includes Kolkata Arts Lane Festival (one of India’s largest public street art festivals) and Para Artscapes in Kolkata, a city-wide public art trail rooted in community memory and artistic residency, and Red Pepper and Black Pepper at the New Forest Heritage Centre, which used co-curation to bring new visibility to Indian WWI soldiers in rural Hampshire. She has worked with organisations including the V&A, Horniman Museum, Barbican Art Gallery, and the National Trust, often creating frameworks that centre underrepresented voices and lived experience.
Rungta’s exhibitions don’t just occupy space—they reshape the way we move through it. At Hardwick, the building hasn’t changed. But suddenly, it feels like it’s listening.
Material Power: Rewoven, April – 31st October 2025 Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire
Curated by Devanshi Rungta | Commissioned by the National Trust as part of Woven Worlds
About
Hardwick Hall, a National Trust property in Derbyshire, is home to one of the most significant collections of Elizabethan textiles in Britain. Built in the late 1500s by Bess of Hardwick—a powerful Elizabethan matriarch—the Hall is renowned for its rich tapestry interiors, including a rare series of 16th-century Gideon tapestries.
In July 2023, the National Trust completed the 24-year conservation of these 13 Gideon tapestries—its longest textile treatment project to date. The £1.7 million project received High Commendation at the Museum + Heritage Awards and won the prestigious Europa Nostra 2024 Award for Conservation and Adaptive Re-use.
