From woven fibres to sculpted metal and clay, textural wall art is redefining high-end living spaces with depth, tactility and light.
4 min
In 2026, home interior trends are predicted to reflect our growing need for warmth, comfort and personal expression: a response, perhaps, to the fast-paced, always-on lifestyle many of us feel forced to embrace.
And where better to start than the four walls that define your living space? Unlike flat prints and traditional paintings, textured art invites engagement, creating a dynamic ambience in living rooms, bedrooms and outdoor entertaining spaces.
Interior designers are increasingly looking to create a multi-sensory experience, and wall art is a key part of that: blending art and sculpture, creating a focal point, and showcasing changing light patterns throughout the day.
Weaving ways
Sydney-based fibre artist Catriona Pollard uses traditional techniques to transform foraged plant fibres and recycled materials into evocative, sculptural works.
“I discovered weaving more than a decade ago, at a time when I was searching for a slower, more mindful way of creating,” she says.
“I had been working in a very fast-paced environment, and weaving became a way to reconnect with myself and with nature.”
Much of Pollard’s inspiration comes directly from the Australian landscape, from the textures of bark, seed pods and leaves, to the movement of wind and water.
“I see weaving not just as a technique, but as a dialogue with nature, where the materials guide the direction of the work as much as I do,” she explains.
Textural wall art is credited with bringing another dimension to how we experience art. A flat canvas is viewed front-on, but fibre works extend into space and interact with their surroundings.
They cast shadows that shift throughout the day, so the work is never static, it is alive and responsive to light.
“There is something visceral about woven materials,” says Pollard.
“People instinctively want to touch them, to feel the textures and patterns. Fibre carries its own history, whether it is a vine that once grew in the bush or copper wire that once carried electricity, and that embedded story becomes part of the artwork.”
Metal magic
At the other end of the material spectrum, metal is also having a moment. Flexible, versatile and built to last, it brings a striking talking point to entertaining spaces indoors or out.
“I have been making sculptural wall art for over 30 years. I draw my ideas from organic shapes in nature and also from mechanical and architectural forms, and make work that has texture, depth and movement,” says Helen Neyland, artist and creative director at Entanglements Metal Art Studio at her Jasper Road studio in Melbourne’s Ormond.
“Metal wall art breaks away from a painting. It is 3D, it is textural, it works indoors or out, in foyers, large voids and bare walls. As the light passes through the day, the shadows change, stretching and falling across the wall. It gives you a work that is alive. You can backlight it for effect, or just let the light play naturally.”
Neyland notes that more people are seeking handmade, crafted pieces.
“There is more value placed on artisan work,” she says. “Sculptural wall art gives depth, presence and honesty that you do not get with mass-produced pieces.”
Emerging artists
Bluethumb Gallery is Australia’s largest online gallery of original art, representing more than 30,000 emerging and established artists across the country.
Nadia Vitlin is one of them. Based in Sydney, she has a background in geospatial and biological sciences and describes her art as bringing together “the study of nature, humanity, emotions and sociological phenomena through the lens of the scientist”, via the tactile form of clay.
“I do also create two-dimensional works, and love having ‘flat’ art on my walls, but 3D and textured wall art is really having a moment,” she says.
“This may be because they are like hung sculptures more than they are paintings, and can contribute to the feel of a space rather than directly telling a visual story. Another thing may be that the tactility of a 3D object is quite irresistible.
“I always let gallery visitors touch my artworks – within reason! It is especially tempting because I make hard clay look soft, so the brain cannot help but want to feel it to understand it.”
Sculptor Brad Gunn agrees. “I think the element of depth captures the viewer’s eyes more quickly. It invites touch, and the tactile nature gives a secondary element to the work.
“Also, as the light changes in the room, either from the natural sun’s rays, overhead lighting or lamps, the work will cast its own shadows and feel different throughout the day.”
This story appeared in the summer issue of Kanebridge Quarterly Magazine. You can buy a copy here.
Rugged coastal drives and fireside drams define a slow, indulgent journey through Scotland’s far north.
A haven for hedge-fund titans and Hollywood grandees, Greenwich is one of the world’s most expensive residential enclaves, where eye-watering prices meet unapologetic grandeur.
Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.
4 min
Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.
So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.
“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.
It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.
“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.
After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.
The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.
But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.
They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.
Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.
“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.
“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”
“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”
Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.
When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.
The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.
It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.
He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.
In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.
About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.
In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.
About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.
Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.
“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.
Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.
Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.
So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.
When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.
“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.
It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.
Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.
“The opposite of AI,” she said.
Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.
“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.
Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.
His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.
Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.
“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.
“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”
