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...
(...)
Want to read more of this article?
ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER?
Magazine subscribers automatically get free access to all of our online content.
We send the access code by email with the publication of each issue. You will also find it on the envelope containing your magazine.
Please note the access code changes every issue.
We are proud to be a subscriber-funded publication with members in 185 countries. We know our readership is passionate about textiles, so we invite you to help us preserve and promote the stories, memories, and histories that fabric holds.
. . .
Image Credits:
Lead: Gözde İlkin, Those Who Remember Their Births, 2026 © Gözde İlkin
All further images as credited in captions.