This summer, CAMPLE LINE is delighted to present exhibitions from Katie Schwab and Majd Abdel Hamid. Palestinian artist Majd Abdel Hamid will present Murmuration, comprising new and recent works in embroidery and textile which explore recurring concerns in his practice – memory, trauma, time and repair.
Glasgow-based artist Katie Schwab will present The warp and woof of my self, an exhibition of new and recent works in textile, ceramic and wood that explore her longstanding interest in personal and social histories of craft, design and education.
Majd Abdel Hamid, Daydreamers (Fortune Tellers), 2025, dimensions variable, Cell Project Space, London. Photo: Damien Griffiths
Whilst borrowing from Palestinian embroidery traditions, Abdel Hamid’s needlework is self-taught. His work is invariably handmade, small in scale, intended to be easily portable and he typically works in series, some of which extend over years. His projects arise in response to memories or aspects of his own lived experience as well as the experiences and testimonies of others, often as a means to record or resist the impacts of traumatic contexts or events. Increasingly he has referred to preoccupations with notions of movement, permanence and coincidence: ‘Whenever a coincidence happens, I claim it.’
Abdel Hamid has said ‘embroidery is this soft spot that can heal’ and has spoken of how it can offer a connection with locality. Murmuration invites visitors to encounter his work in a rural, small community context, the exhibition’s title invoking natural patterns of collective behaviour that may be simultaneously defensive, protective, adaptive and instinctive. This new exhibition builds upon a sense of departure or release in Abdel Hamid’s practice recently described by curator Adomas Narkevičius: ‘not an erasure or a resolution but an opening towards what remains possible. It is a meditation on how everyday acts of making may partake in the understated project of continuity, possibility, quiet joy, and life.’
Often in her practice, Schwab has taken inspiration from context-specific traditions of making, such as the Cryséde block printing factory in St Ives or hosiery manufacturing in Leicestershire. Increasingly, she has drawn upon her own family history of textile production and begun to explore materials and making processes connected to wider notions of reconstitution and repair. She has said: ‘I want to acknowledge the vulnerability of things, objects, relations, emotions – they are in a constant state of flux, of breaking down and being reborn.’
For this exhibition, Schwab draws together works from three projects which bear some resonance with Cample Mill’s history as a site of highly localised rural manufacturing. In a reference to its operation as a spinning and weaving mill that incorporated millworkers’ dwellings, she will re-install elements of small wares & hard wares, 2021 in our downstairs space. Commissioned originally for Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art in Middelburg in the Netherlands, the original installation of the work comprised three narrow band weaves, woven at the TextielLab in Tilburg with all the holes and repairs made in the weaving process left visible.
The exhibition will also feature a group of new ceramic works, including a porcelain cast of a spiral of pleated Petersham ribbon that belonged to Schwab’s great-grandmother, which she pit-fired during a recent residency at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop. She has said that finding and working with the ribbon ‘has become a kind of metaphor for this journey into generational making.’
Touching on Cample Mill’s more recent use as a furniture workshop in the 1980s, Schwab will also install a new suspended sculpture incorporating braided chair spindles, temporarily diverted from a commission she is developing with furniture maker Simon Worthington for Hospitalfield, Arbroath. A new short essay by Isabella Smith will accompany the exhibition.
Artist Bios
Majd Abdel Hamid (b.1988, Damascus, Syria) grew up in Ramallah in the West Bank and is currently based between Beirut and Paris. He graduated from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden (2010) and attended the International Academy of Art in Palestine (2007-2009).
Recent solo exhibitions include: GAK Bremen, Germany; Kunsthalle St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland; Cell Projects, London, UK; Grey Noise, Dubai; Marfa, Beirut, Lebanon (all 2025) and Signal, Malmö, Sweden (2024). His work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including: Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France; Phenomenon, Anafi, Greece; Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Prix Reiffers Art Initiatives, Paris, France; Art Explora, Photograph Pavillion (all 2024); Hirafen, Tunis, Tunisia (2023); Kyiv Biennial, Vienna, Austria (2023); Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, UAE (2022) and SMAK, Ghent, Belgium (2022)
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Katie Schwab (b. 1985, Hackney, London) is based in Glasgow, and currently teaches at Edinburgh College of Art. She works with installation, textiles, sculpture and moving image to explore personal and social histories of craft, design, and education. Embedded in the communities and contexts in which she works, Schwab’s projects incorporate collaborative workshops, archival research and craft-based learning.
Recent exhibitions include British Art Show 9, Hayward Gallery Touring (2021-22), small wares, Vleeshal, Middelburg, The Netherlands (2021); Another Crossing, Artists Revisit the Mayflower Voyage, Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA, USA & The Box, Plymouth, UK (2021-22), A Working Building, The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth (2019) and This Interesting and Wonderful Factory, Clore Sky Studio Commission, Tate St Ives, St Ives (2018).
Murmuration is supported by Creative Scotland. The warp and woof of my self is supported by Creative Scotland with additional support from SSW x Counterflows Caregivers Residency, Hospitalfield Future Plan Project, Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Arts Council England.
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