Touchlines

This summer, The 62 Group of Textile Artists returns to Sunny Bank Mills with its 2026 exhibition, Touchlines: The Delicate Boundaries of Care and Cloth.

Each year, the group responds to a new brief for their annual exhibition. This year’s theme was developed in collaboration with Anna Turzynski, the Mills’ Arts Director, drawing on the site’s rich industrial and cultural history.

In Touchlines, artists explore the subtle thresholds where contact is felt, withheld, or transformed. Set within the historic spaces of Sunny Bank Mills, the exhibition draws connections between textile labour, sporting cultures, and human relationships, asking how boundaries shape intimacy, care, and collective identity.

Across a range of material-led and process-driven practices, the works foreground acts of repair, preservation, and making. Cloth emerges not simply as a medium, but as a site where emotional and social histories are embedded and reworked.

The exhibition invites viewers to slow down and reflect on the quiet gestures, fragile edges, and resilient connections tracing the points where making meets lived experience.