There’s something irresistible about abstract art. Its ability to bypass logic and speak straight to the senses is what captivates us most. In textile form, abstraction becomes even more powerful. It’s not only seen, but also felt. Texture, colour, rhythm and space all combine to create artworks that are as much about emotion as they are about materials. It’s art that invites you to pause, look closer, and lose yourself in the unexpected.
This instalment in our “Artists You HAVE to Follow” series celebrates 10 remarkable contemporary abstract textile artists who are reimagining what textile art can be. Whether working with felt, hand stitch, machine embroidery, or mixed media, each artist brings a bold, boundary-pushing vision to their practice. United by their abstract approach, they channel intuition, movement, and material play to create works that spark joy, curiosity, and wonderment.
Handpicked for this review for their originality and expressive power, these artists aren’t just makers. They’re creative catalysts. We’re reviewing their work to ignite your imagination, inspire your process, and perhaps most importantly, remind you that there are no rules when it comes to making art.
Before we start...
Don’t forget to check out our other blogs in the Artists you Have to Follow Series.
- 10 Textile Sculptors
- 10 Textile Artists Inspired by Animals
- 10 Textile Artists Inspired by Architecture
- 9 Textile Artists Inspired by Food
- 10 Textiles Artists Inspired by the Ocean
- Textile Artists Inspired by Nature
- 10 Textile Portrait Artists
- 10 Contemporary Felt Artists
- Machine Embroidery Artists You Have to Follow
- Hand Embroidery Artists You Have to Follow
- Inspiring Patchwork Quilt Artists You Have to Follow
- Inspiring Knit Artists You Have to Follow
10 Abstract Textile Artists
1. Noelle Thomas
Noelle Thomas’s textile work radiates warmth, joy, and an intuitive sense of design that is deeply rooted in her life by the Cornish coast. With a keen eye for colour and form, she transforms the everyday – from garden blooms to harbour life – into bold, abstract compositions rendered entirely by hand stitch. Her pieces brim with energy. Each one a playful yet deliberate dance of bright threads and organic shapes. Rather than aiming for realism, Thomas distils her surroundings into expressive visual impressions, capturing the essence of coastal life through vibrant abstraction.
What sets Thomas apart is the way she embraces the meditative slowness of hand stitching while creating work that feels spontaneous and alive. Her use of bold colours and irregular forms gives her embroidery a painterly quality, evoking a sense of movement and mood rather than fixed imagery. This abstract approach allows her to explore a deeply personal connection with place; not through literal depictions but through emotional resonance. In doing so, Thomas offers a fresh and joyful perspective on embroidery as a modern artform, celebrating both the tactile beauty of stitch and the expressive power of colour.
Follow Noelle Thomas
Website: www.etsy.com/uk/shop/textileartbynoelle
Instagram: @noelletextileart
2. Sylvie van Oosterhout
Sylvie Van Oosterhout’s textile and mixed media work offers a deeply introspective and emotive exploration of the human experience. Drawing from a rich background in visual arts, therapeutic practice, and cross-cultural influences, particularly her formative years in Benin, Van Oosterhout constructs abstract compositions that blend memory, emotion, and intuition. Her use of textiles as a narrative tool allows her to layer personal histories and psychological landscapes into textured, dreamlike pieces. Through careful stitching, layering, and surface manipulation, she evokes inner worlds where memory and imagination intermingle.
Her abstract approach is subtle yet profoundly expressive. Rather than offering literal representations, Van Oosterhout works with a visual language of texture, colour, and mark-making. She explores themes of identity, vulnerability, and transformation. There is a quiet complexity in her work. A tension between structure and fluidity, between what is revealed and what is withheld. In this way, her practice becomes both a meditative process and a philosophical inquiry. She does not simply depict; she unearths, using textile as a medium to map the unseen contours of thought and feeling.
Follow Sylvie van Oosterhout
Website: sylvievanoosterhout.nl
Instagram: @sylvievanoosterhout
3. Laurine Malengreau
Laurine Malengreau is a compelling abstract artist whose textile paintings fuse ancient tradition with a deeply personal, contemporary vision. Working with silk and wool, she crafts shimmering, layered works that radiate strength and sensuality. She draws inspiration from her rich life experience, living across cultures, and her training as an art historian. Laurine creates pieces that feel both rooted and ethereal. Her materials are luxurious, yet the energy they carry is raw and elemental, echoing the primal joy she finds in their making. Each piece is a vibrant exploration of movement, memory, and the pure gesture born from deep introspection.
Bridging Eastern and Western influences, Laurine’s work offers a modern take on the tradition of wall hangings, elevating them into abstract expressions of vitality and wonder. Her art doesn’t shout. It resonates! There’s a kind of quiet power in the way she captures organic forms and dreamlike symbols, infusing each composition with what she calls “chimerical roots.” In a world so often cluttered with noise, Laurine Malengreau’s work stands out as a source of beauty, contemplation, and artistic truth.
Follow Laurine Malengreau
Website: www.laurinemalengreau.com
Instagram: @laurine_artextile
4. Margarita Brum
Margarita Brum is a textile artist whose abstract works are an elegant blend of delicacy and emotional depth. With a practice grounded in fibre art, she masterfully uses layering, transparency, and texture to evoke the quiet yet complex landscape of human emotion. Her pieces often feel like visual whispers; soft, ethereal, and open-ended. They invite the viewer to pause and reflect. Through materials like gauze, thread, and paper, she creates works that speak of fragility and resilience, memory and presence.
What makes Margarita Brum an abstract artist to watch is the way she manipulates fibre as both material and metaphor. Her work transcends traditional textile techniques, becoming deeply contemplative, almost meditative visual poems. Inspired by natural rhythms, inner worlds, and the passage of time, her practice is an ongoing exploration of what lies beneath the surface. Rather than offering clear narratives, her textiles act as visual meditations. They’re often emotive, mysterious, and resonant. Margarita Brum proves that abstraction, when handled with subtlety and intuition, can be both powerful and profoundly moving.
Follow Margarita Brum
Instagram: @criaturacorazon
5. Annalisa Bollini
Annalisa Bollini is a standout talent in the world of contemporary textile art. Known for her richly layered abstract embroidery pieces that blend narrative, memory, and emotion. With a background in illustration, she brings a unique visual storytelling quality to her work. Yet, her pieces are anything but literal. Instead, they evoke fragmented stories and dreamlike impressions through abstract forms, stitched textures, and layered fabrics. Her compositions often feel like pages from an emotional map – familiar yet unplaceable, tactile yet elusive. Using techniques such as collage, freehand embroidery, and appliqué, Annalisa crafts intricate pieces that invite introspection and emotional resonance.
What makes Annalisa Bollini’s abstract embroidery so compelling is her ability to balance chaos and harmony within each piece. There’s a poetic tension in her work: A push and pull between the rawness of torn edges and the delicacy of fine threadwork. Her art doesn’t seek to explain, but to evoke, using fabric and stitch as a language of instinct and intuition. Whether working on small-format pieces or larger textile collages, she captures the transient beauty of memories, places, and internal landscapes. Annalisa’s work shows that she’s stitching layers of experience, thought, and emotion into abstract works that quietly demand your attention.
Follow Annalisa Bollini
Instagram: @annalisa.bollini.2hands2tails
6. Kristine Stattin
Kristine Stattin’s abstract embroidery work is a masterclass in contrast, spontaneity, and intuitive mark-making. Working from her studio in the Occitanie region of southern France, she weaves a dynamic tension between precision and chaos. Long, deliberate stitched lines collide with bursts of French knots, machine embroidery meets slow handwork. Her process is deliberately fluid, rooted in a surrender to the moment and a refusal to cling to expectations. Instead of planning outcomes, she allows the materials, threads, colours and forms to guide the journey. The result? Pieces that feel organic and alive. Every embroidery is its own enigma, an emotional and visual puzzle slowly unravelled with thread.
Stattin’s work radiates movement and energy, with layers of coloured threads stitched on top of one another to create complex, textured surfaces. Her palette, often drawn instinctively from nature or her surroundings, balances delicate pastels with more saturated, vibrant tones. Occasional elements like appliqué, screen-printed motifs, or painted flourishes are added intuitively, making each piece feel like a spontaneous dialogue between artist and material. What truly sets her apart is her willingness to welcome ‘mistakes’ and experiment. Stattin’s abstract embroideries don’t just illustrate a scene or a thought; they invite you into an unfolding process, a dance of thread and feeling that captures life in motion.
Follow Kristen Stattin
Website: www.kristinestattin.com
Instagram: @kristine_stattin
7. Emily Van Hoff
Emily Van Hoff is a Chicago-based textile artist and designer whose work sits confidently at the intersection of art, design, and craft. With a background in graphic design and a restless drive to create with her hands, Van Hoff found her artistic voice through quilting. This art form allows her to explore texture, colour, and form with playful yet precise intent. Her abstract textile works are instantly recognisable, blending clean design sensibilities with an instinctive, experimental approach to materials. Each piece is a celebration of contrast: deliberate construction paired with a deeply personal freedom to explore, respond, and evolve.
The emotional depth of Van Hoff’s work is matched by its visual richness. Born from a period of profound personal loss and reflection, her current body of work grew out of a need to heal and create without constraint. In 2020, following the sudden death of her husband and the loss of her job during the pandemic, she gave herself permission to make for the sake of making. This act of resilience has sparked an artistic journey now central to her life. Through this process, she discovered that the pieces which brought her the most joy resonated widely, capturing the raw beauty of process, grief, and reinvention. Her quilts, abstract and emotionally textured, are tactile maps of recovery and curiosity. We love them for their bold precision.
Follow Emily Van Hoff
Website: www.emilyvanhoff.com
Instagram: @emilyvanhoff
8. Tammy Kanat
Tammy Kanat is a Melbourne-based fibre artist whose woven works pulse with movement, energy and emotion. Originally trained as a jewellery designer, she brings a keen eye for balance and detail to her textile practice. Her works utilise the precision of her former craft into large-scale, tactile artworks. With looping forms, radiant colour palettes that echo nature’s patterns and emotion her pieces are defined by their intuitive rhythm. Working on the loom, Kanat allows instinct to lead, eschewing rigid planning in favour of a free-flowing process that brings a strong sense of life and spontaneity to her creations.
Kanat’s work exists in a beautiful tension between control and freedom, where colour, texture and shape form immersive compositions that are both meditative and invigorating. Each piece is a quiet conversation between material and maker, shaped by a deep trust in process and presence. Her abstract, circular forms often feel like visual mantras, and offer viewers a space to reflect and reconnect. As a fibre artist with a growing international following, represented by Gallery Sally Dan Cuthbert, Tammy Kanat continues to push the boundaries of weaving as contemporary art. This undoubtedly makes her one of the most compelling abstract textile artists to follow today.
Follow Tammy Kanat
Website: www.tammykanat.com
Instagram: @tammykanat
9. Lou Gardiner
Lou Gardiner’s work is a dazzling celebration of embroidery’s expressive potential. She combines abstract vibrancy and theatrical energy to a traditionally delicate craft. Using free-motion embroidery like a paintbrush, she “draws” with thread across linen and canvas in sweeping, instinctive gestures. Her compositions pulse with movement and colour, often layered with appliqué, ink, hand-painted details, and intricate beading. The result is artwork that is both meticulous and wildly free. It’s organic in form yet structured through her masterful control of technique. Gardiner’s approach to abstract textile art is distinctly her own: bold, celebratory, and emotionally charged, blurring the boundaries between illustration, fine art, and fashion.
What makes Gardiner’s contribution to abstract textile art especially compelling is her ability to convey both spontaneity and precision in a single piece. There’s an exuberance in her work that feels fearless, yet it’s grounded in decades of refined skill and dedication. Her compositions often evoke natural forms or fleeting moments of energy, yet resist literal interpretation, inviting viewers to experience texture and movement on a visceral level. She breathes new life into embroidery as an artform. Not only through her vivid visual language but also in her passionate advocacy for the medium, expanding its audience and re-establishing it as a contemporary force in the fine art world. Through both her work and public presence, Gardiner continues to elevate embroidery as a powerful tool for abstract expression.
Follow Lou Gardiner
Website: www.lougardiner.co.uk
Instagram: @lou_gardiner_embroidery
10. Lynn Comley
Lynn Comley’s felted textile artworks sit at a poetic intersection of abstraction and natural observation. Rooted in her deep connection to the North Yorkshire coast and moorland, her pieces distil the textures and micro-patterns of her environment. Through the tactile alchemy of wet felting, she harnesses the unpredictable behaviour of wool fibres as a form of artistic expression, embracing the medium’s natural shrinkage and distortion to guide each piece’s development. Her use of abstract forms isn’t about denying nature’s detail but rather heightening it. Transforming the overlooked intricacies of the natural world into vibrant felted textures that evoke rather than replicate.
Comley’s approach to abstraction is gentle and grounded, allowing surface texture, colour, and fibre movement to evoke a sense of place without being literal. Her use of hand-dyed wool and thread builds tonal depth and spatial complexity much like a painter works with washes. Plus, her free-motion embroidery adds a second layer of mark-making that feels responsive and intuitive. By refusing to impose rigid outlines or precise figuration, she lets the fibre speak for itself. This balance between technique and surrender gives her work a quiet energy. Each piece is both a personal meditation and a celebration of the textures of the natural world. In doing so, she elevates felt from its often underestimated status, presenting it as a serious, expressive medium within contemporary abstract textile art.
Follow Lynn Comley
Website: www.upanddowndale.co.uk
Instagram: @upanddowndale
