Poppy Jones at Towner Eastbourne, textiles and watercolour

May 24. Poppy Jones opens her first solo institutional show at Towner Eastbourne, a gallery an hour south of London that tends to catch designers between bigger things. The show is called Tender. Twelve pieces, half textile, half watercolour, one video loop. Jones is known in fashion circles for the textile collages she made for Simone Rocha's 2023 show, but the Towner show pulls from an older register: her father's archive.

Dafydd Jones shot parties for Vanity Fair in the 1980s and 1990s. Black-and-white reportage, flash on skin, the kind of work that reads dated now but holds up in stills. Poppy Jones has been working with scans of his contact sheets since 2021, layering them under gauze and watercolour washes. The pieces at Towner use this structure: a scan, a textile overlay, a colour field that mutes the photograph underneath. The effect is softer than the originals, which is the point.

The textile beat

Jones studied at Central Saint Martins but didn't finish the degree. She left in her second year to work at a dye house in East London, learning natural pigment process and hand-stitching. The textiles in the Towner show reflect that training: raw linen, indigo, madder root, weld. No synthetic dyes. The palette runs beige to rust to faded blue. The stitching is visible, intentionally uneven. It reads as process-first work, the kind that takes longer to make than to look at.

The video piece, Contact, loops footage of Jones sorting through her father's negatives. Three minutes, no sound, close-up on her hands. It's the least resolved piece in the show, but it anchors the thesis: the archive as material, not nostalgia.

The closer

The show runs through August 3. Towner Eastbourne is a 90-minute train from London, which means the opening will draw the Saint Martins crowd but not the Frieze set. That distance feels intentional. Jones has been careful about where her work lands. This is her first solo show, but she's been placing pieces quietly for three years. The Towner show suggests she's ready to step into a wider frame, but on her own timeline.