Fascinated by textiles and the stories they can tell, Hannah Lamb’s practice is a personal dialogue with materials. Experimenting with layers of imagery and surface, her working process threads a fine balance between control and risk, making and unmaking. Print, cyanotype, stitch and construction techniques are carefully combined to create sculptural installation works and smaller, more intimate pieces.
Her interest in archives, collections and the heritage of textile manufacturing in the North of England has led to a number of collaborations and commissions, including ‘A Cloth for the Lost Mills’ with Hannah Robson (509 Arts, 2024) and ‘Lasting Impressions’ with Claire Wellesley-Smith (Salts Mill, 2016-17). Pieces shown at Sunny Bank Mill (’DeConstructed Cloth’, 2020) and at the the Whitaker for the British Textile Biennial (‘Incomplete Histories’, 2021) also draw on global and local narratives of textile production.
Alongside exploring the industrial and global heritage of textiles, Hannah also has an interest in our personal connections to cloth. ‘Fragment of a Dress’ (2022) commissioned by the Brontë Parsonage Museum, captures memories and personal narratives about the clothes we love and hold dear. The work explores what we choose to keep and cherish, and how memory can help us to connect through cloth. In 2024 she created ‘Inheritance’ (exhibited at Salts Mill) as a reflection on the tactile nature of cloth and the learning that takes place through touch.
Alongside her work as an exhibiting artist, Hannah is a lecturer and author. She teaches across BA and other higher education programmes at Bradford School of Art, Bradford College. She has taught widely across the UK and beyond, including workshops and masterclasses for Fibre Arts Australia, Harewood House, Gawthorpe Textile Collection, Textile Study Group, Hope & Elvis, DeMontfort University and The 62 Group. She has written two books on textile art; ‘Poetic Cloth’ (2019) and ‘Unfolding Cloth: Inspiration from historical textiles’ (2025), both published by Batsford.
