Poppy Nash
(United Kingdom)
Skin, cloth, needles, ink, stitching, folding — these are the materials and actions at the heart of Poppy Nash’s practice. Working across textile, print and installation, Nash brings together the authority of the printed word and the pliancy of fabric to explore care, memory and agency. Her work is rooted in research into disability histories, medical systems and archival structures, and shaped by her own lived experience of chronic illness.
Textile is both metaphor and method. Nash’s works explore how soft materials can push back against hard systems — where stitching becomes annotation, and folding becomes a gesture of protection or containment. Material softness isn't fragility; it's a strategy.
Recent works have primarily employed salvaged fabric and digital embroidery, layered to sit between legibility and abstraction. By deliberately disrupting the embroidery machine — pulling, compressing, misdirecting its programmed precision — Nash attempts to reroute the logic of systems that regulate and depersonalise disabled bodies, turning that logic toward refusal and self-definition.
Humour and tenderness sit alongside critique throughout. Intimacy is a political strategy: stitching, tracing and wrapping as acts of resistance. Textile becomes the material through which personal and political histories are continuously renegotiated.
B. 1992 Poppy Nash lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.
Current work includes research project Disabled Studio as Method. Recent exhibitions include KISS THE BACK OF MY HAND, Glasshouse, Gathering Gallery London; Shelter, with Outside/In at Christie’s, London.