Kara Walker, Grayson Perry, Beatriz Milhazes and Fred Tomaselli are among fifteen internationally renowned artists who explore a medium foreign to their usual practise, experimenting with the lost world of wall-hanging tapestry for the exhibition Demons, Yarns & Tales at The Dairy in Bloomsbury.

Three years in the making, the exhibition is curated by Christopher and Suzanne Sharp, who asked the artists to take a voyage into the unknown, leaving their area of comfort to work in unfamiliar territory. Tapestry has become a bit of a lost art, made redundant by the sheer expense of its production and non-compliance within a world impatient to conform to the ease of mass-production.

The exhibition is an experiment within this lost world and addresses themes of translation and transformation. It is possible to see the shifting transformation of each artist’s unique visual style from his or her known medium into the uncharted and the unknown. Initially, the physical medium itself becomes apparent and appears engaging and challenging. The artist is preoccupied with technical matters: unfamiliar colours, the texture of the material, the properties of the different threads and the complexity of the weave. Then, as the work develops, the new medium begins to contribute to, rather than compromise the finished work; giving birth to a thoroughly contemporary art form, evolving naturally from its historical past.

Gavin Turk created a world map of wasted nations from crumpled and discarded crisp bags, cigarette packs and drink cans for Mappa Del Mundo.

Anonymous artists’ collective, avaf, created a carnival collage in aaxé vatapá alegria feijão, combining a visual mix of totemic heads with candy-kitsch objects.

Kara Walker’s A warm summer evening in 1863 uses an image, captioned ‘The Destruction of the Coloured Orphan Asylum on 5th Avenue’, that was published in Harpers Pictorial History of the Civil War in the years immediately following the end of the American Civil War in 1865. In the work a black silhouette of a lynched female figure hangs in front of this historical scene of racially motivated violence.

Grayson Perry invites us to Vote Alan Measles for God in a tapestry littered with images that we associate with the perceived threat of global terrorism – Osama bin Laden, the Twin Towers and guarded oil fields – following the historical tradition of using tapestry to tell stories of power struggles and war; a Bayeux tapestry for modern times.

Paul Noble transfers the draughtsmanship and humour of his meticulous graphite drawings of the fictional city, Nobson Newtown, to an aerial view of villa joe formed of intricate woven stitches.

This exhibition is FREE and takes place at The Dairy, 7 Wakefield Street (off Handel Street), London WC1 from 10 - 22 November 2008.

See bannersofpersuasion.com for more information.