TM GALLERY | TEXTILES AND TRUE COLOURS

TM GALLERY | TEXTILES AND TRUE COLOURS
TM Gallery at COLLECT 2026 presented by TM Gallery, curated by Hannah Payne Art

TM Gallery, the not-for-profit exhibition space founded by the team behind TM Lighting, announces a two-part presentation by Chilean textile artist Carmen Mardonez, presented by TM Gallery, curated by Hannah Payne Art. This project unfolds across two locations, beginning with a presentation at COLLECT 2026 in February, before continuing with a solo exhibition at TM Gallery in March.

The first chapter of this curatorial project opens at Collect 2026, the international fair for contemporary, museum-quality craft and design. Presented within a dedicated space at COLLECT Bar in the Navy Board Room at Somerset House, Mardonez introduces Textildermy, a body of work in which the artist reclaims embroidery as a contemporary, expressive medium. The title merges “textile” and “taxidermy,” evoking ideas of skin, preservation and transformation. Fabric becomes a second skin, a surface that holds memory, intimacy and lived experience, while resisting embroidery’s traditional associations with decoration or domestic utility. In this work, Mardonez reimagines embroidery as a contemporary visual language shaped by colour, gesture and material presence.

Created in 2023 while the artist was living and working in Los Angeles, Textildermy IV, V and VI are shaped by the city’s intense light and colour. Saturated pinks, vivid greens and neon tonal shifts echo LA’s sunsets, beaches and expansive skies, while the works’ scale and physicality reflect an embodied engagement with place.

TM Gallery, Carmen Mardonez | Chromatic Solace presented by Hannah Payne Art, 20 March – 5 June 2026
TM Lighting, Gallery, 7 Cubitt Street, London WC1X 0LN
Opening hours: Weekdays, 11:00am – 5:00pm (by appointment)

The project continues at TM Gallery with Chromatic Solace, a solo exhibition which debuts a new large-scale embroidered installation measuring over five metres in width, shown publicly for the first time, alongside works from the artist’s Textildermy series and a sculptural, wall-based textile piece. While Textildermy establishes embroidery as skin and surface, Chromatic Solace deepens Mardonez’s exploration of colour, scale and spatial immersion, and making, which, for the artist, creates a sense of home.

Created in response to the saturated light of Los Angeles, the works are infused with vivid pinks, purples and greens that echo sunsets, beaches and neon-lit cityscapes. These chromatic influences sit alongside Mardonez’s long-standing fascination with the Northern Lights, whose shifting colours and atmospheric qualities inform the movement and rhythm of her stitched surfaces.

Working freehand and intuitively, Mardonez builds each composition through accumulations of thread. Painterly gestures emerge through repeated stitches, layering colour and texture into expansive fields. Using discarded domestic textiles such as bedsheets and clothing, her practice subtly engages with histories of labour and care embedded within textile traditions, while asserting embroidery as a site of autonomy, experimentation and creative freedom.

Harry Triggs, Founding Director at TM Lighting comments, “These large-scale embroidered surfaces are vividly brought to life through TMs high-colour rendition lighting using the Gallery 130, illuminating the depth, ensuring colour authenticity and texture of Carmen’s intricate work. We are really excited to be showing this artist. Her work speaks to our commitment to showing artwork with colour authenticity”.

Founded by the team behind TM Lighting, TM Gallery operates as a not-for-profit platform bringing together mid-career curators and artists through exhibitions, experimentation and exceptional art lighting.   The gallery’s programme reflects TM Lighting’s broader philanthropic commitment to contemporary practice, including its ongoing partnership with the Royal Society of Sculptors through the Gilbert Bayes Award 2025, currently on view at TM Gallery until 11 March 2026.

As part of the current programme, TM Gallery will present an Artist Talk with Carmen Mardonez in conversation with TF Chan, Director of COLLECT, at TM Gallery on 29 April, 6.30 – 8.30 pm.

Carmen Mardonez, Textildermy IV, 2023, hand embroidered thread on discarded bedsheet, (120 x 122 cm / 47 x 48 in), image courtesy of the Artist and Hannah Payne Art.