Inside a gallery in Cornwall, stones from the St Ives shoreline are wearing embroidered coverings stitched by local women and an artist from Istanbul. They form part of Gözde İlkin’s new Tate St Ives commission, Those Who Remember Their Births, which begins its story with a family bedsheet.
Most of us have a sheet like it somewhere, slept under for years and handed down with a patch or two. İlkin, who lives and works in Istanbul, gathers found domestic cloth such as bedsheets and tablecloths, and treats it as a keeper of experiences that written histories tend to leave out. For this commission she worked vintage family bedsheets with batik and wire, coaxing them into flowing, wave-like forms suspended through the space. Folds and layers echo moving water, while painted and embroidered details drawn from archival photographs of St Ives women in the fishing and mining industries sit alongside motifs of plants and stones.
Gözde İlkin, Those Who Remember Their Births, 2026 © Gözde İlkin
St Ives is where generations of British families have taken their summer holidays, building sandcastles on the harbour beaches and bringing home sand in every fold of the bedding. İlkin arrived to a town with a longer memory than the holiday postcards suggest. During two residencies at Porthmeor Studios in 2026 she came to see the coastline as a living archive, with tides and wind forever reshaping it. Cloth behaves in much the same way, taking on the marks of everyone who has handled it.
Gözde İlkin, Those Who Remember Their Births, 2026 © Gözde İlkin
Kinship runs through the project in more than one sense. The commission is the fifth round of a residency programme between Tate St Ives and SAHA, which has already supported Burçak Bingöl, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Cansu Çakar and Ahmet Doğu İpek, and which links St Ives with Türkiye through exchange and research. It works rather like a long-standing family arrangement, with each side hosting the other’s artists and learning from them.
Gözde İlkin, Those Who Remember Their Births, 2026 © Gözde İlkin
Closer to home, the Tate’s community curators, Georgina Kennedy and Cassie Penn, led local collaborations, including a workshop with St Ives textile artist Jo McIntosh. Participants shared family histories and local knowledge while stitching coverings for the shoreline stones, and six community contributors are credited alongside the artist. Anyone who has found conversation flowing more freely with a needle in hand will recognise how that works, and wrapping a stone in cloth echoes the instinct to tuck in someone you love.
Support of this kind, from an institution to an artist and from an artist to a town, is a form of family too. On show until 17 January 2027, it is worth a family outing of its own, ideally with someone who can tell you what became of the oldest sheet in your family.
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Further Information:
Exhibition: Gözde İlkin, Those Who Remember Their Births is on show at Tate St. Ives until 17 January 2027
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Image Credits:
Lead: Gözde İlkin, Those Who Remember Their Births, 2026 © Gözde İlkin
All further images as credited in captions.