Lineages at October Gallery: Five Minutes with Bev Butkow
At October Gallery, Lineages unfolds as a considered exploration of how artists understand and activate line — not only as a drawn gesture, but as a material, conceptual and cultural force. Bringing together an international group of practitioners, the exhibition is on view from 29 January to 28 February 2026 and places particular emphasis on tactile, sculptural works shaped by close observation of natural formations and embodied making. Many of the artists are women, and across the exhibition line becomes a quiet but persistent thread connecting process, material and meaning.
Lineages brings together works by Susanne Kessler, Elisabeth Lalouschek, Theresa Weber, Eleanor Lakelin, Junko Mori, Bev Butkow, Golnaz Fathi, Tian Wei, El Anatsui and Gerald Wilde. Working across painting, sculpture, installation and materially driven practices, each artist approaches line in a distinct way — as gesture, structure, rhythm, trace or surface — creating a layered conversation that moves between abstraction, nature, language and cultural memory.
© Bev Butkow. Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery, London.
Textile thinking runs throughout the exhibition, with weaving, stitching and material line appearing in multiple forms and contexts. We were pleased to be able to catch up with Bev Butkow, whose practice sits at the intersection of textile art, painting, sculpture and installation, for this weeks Five Minutes With a Friend conversation. Working with weaving as both a literal and metaphorical process, Butkow explores how care, repetition and ritual operate as transformative forces. Using foraged textiles and hand-worked materials, she is attentive to how things fray, hold together and are remade through acts of repair. In works such as Never Static, line emerges through slow, embodied making, becoming a structure for reflection on connection — between bodies, communities and environments. Her practice reframes weaving as a contemporary, relational language, aligned with the wider concerns of Lineages.
5 Minutes with a Friend: Bev Butkow
Portrait of Bev Butkow. Photo: Anthea Pokroy Photography
Bev, what is your earliest memory of a textile?
My earliest textile memory is going with my mother to her dressmaker – a woman so ancient that her rope-thick hair had faded to a buttery yellow. She took a dress I’d outgrown and remade it into something new. I remember realising that nothing is ever really to be finished with.
Closely connected is another enduring memory: my grandmother hoarding used ribbon and wrapping paper, treating what others discarded as precious. From them I learned to honour materials, and to ‘mother’ what the world throws away. My practice grows from that tension between excess and specificity, chaos and care, slowing people down so that they really look.
© Bev Butkow. Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery, London.
How would you describe what draws you to textiles and the world of making?
After leaving corporate finance to become an artist, I deliberately shifted from thinking with my head to thinking with my body. Textiles gave me that pathway. They invite touch, rhythm and repetition; they activate the senses and engage the body as an intelligent, responsive instrument.
Weaving isn’t just a technique for me – it’s a philosophy: slow, repetitive, relational and transformative. It carries a deep history of women’s labour, which I intentionally reassert as acts of care, resistance and renewal.
My work invites touch because I want viewers to encounter artworks through their bodies, feeling, sensing and thinking differently. My practice is driven by the radical generative power of care: stitching, repairing and imagining new ways of holding the world together.
© Bev Butkow. Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery, London.
Where do you feel most inspired to work?
I adore my studio – a large, light-filled room in one of Johannesburg’s oldest areas. Skylights cast patterns of moving sunlight across the walls, and birds drift in and out. It feels calm, spacious and gently encouraging.
Getting there means crossing the city – from leafy suburbs into Johannesburg’s frenetic CBD, crowded with minibus taxis, informal street vendors, recyclers, newly arrived immigrants and layered human histories. I am reminded that making is deep engagement with the world’s textures. These histories are mine too – my grandfather sold eggs at the Fresh Produce Market in Newtown, and my first job was in the city centre.
I am most inspired where that gritty urban pulse meets the stillness of my studio; that intersection is my creative inspiration.
What has sparked your imagination or inspired you recently?
The words cataclysm, calamity, catastrophe – and, in contrast, care – keep returning to me. I’m drawn to how things seem to fall apart and yet still hold together. Joburg embodies this daily, and so does the breakdown of structures world-wide.
My work sits in that tender, messy space of possibility between breakdown and repair. I often begin with a simple but demanding question: How do we hold things together – differently?
Through slowness, repetition, rhythm, care and repair, my installations imagine alternate ways of being together that are relational, embodied, and attentive.
Mandala. © Bev Butkow. Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery, London.
What is your most treasured textile, and what story does it carry?
I have many: a beaded aubergine fabric from Istanbul; long-worn garments with intimate stories; and vintage ribbons from a friend whose grandfather was a hat maker in the 1950’s.
But the piece closest to my heart is a hand-painted linen mandala made during a period of deliberate deconstruction of my work. I later animated it into a digital film so that the painted marks breathe and evolve; it is a ‘living’ abstract painting that holds both making and unmaking.
I transformed it into a chuppah for our daughter’s wedding, and am now reworking it for our next daughter’s ceremony. It’s a living memory-textile that changes, absorbs love and shapes my practice.
Where did you first learn your craft, and who shaped your early approach to making?
I’m self-taught. My start at weaving came from a painting I hated: I tore the canvas into strips and instinctively wove them back together to ‘make things tidy.’ That paradox –how simplicity conceals infinite complexity – hooked me.
Weaving materialises relationships: between bodies, materials, histories, and stories. Being self-taught lets me misbehave, to let forms wobble, fray and refuse neatness.
Rather than one teacher, my path has been primarily intuitive flow. I’ve had many mentors and collaborators who’ve nudge me at key moments. I carry deep gratitude to the many big- heartedness people who have quietly rooted for me along the way.
Is there a piece of music you return to while you work, that sets the rhythm of your making?
I don’t often reach for music. In the studio, I listen to podcasts, artist talks or audiobooks – a form of productive distraction that quiets my inner critic.
When I do listen to music, it tends to be resonant sound –tuning forks, alchemy bowls or slow drumbeats that synch with my body and breath.
© Bev Butkow. Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery, London.
What material or technique are you currently experimenting with or curious to explore further?
As an Artist in Residence for University of Johannesburg, I am creating a layered, suspended permanent installation for the monumental foyer of the UJ Theater. It is titled ‘Fire my Spirit’ and combines painted walls, translucent fabrics, ribbon and organza to create a shifting poetic ‘landscape’.
The work explores rhythm, repetition, and repair in space — how artistic knowledge becomes physical, collective, and spatial. Rather than imposing form, I’m letting the architecture and materials guide me.
© Bev Butkow. Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery, London.
If you could collaborate with any maker—past or present—who would it be, and why?
I resist choosing one, but if pressed, I would choose Rembrandt.
I admire Eva Hesse’s vulnerability and Phyllida Barlow’s unruly worlds but I’m haunted by Rembrandt’s light and presence – how it gives figures such presence that they seem able to look back at you. That charged, living quality is what I chase my in own work.
© Bev Butkow. Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery, London.
What does a perfect day of making look like for you?
It begins with exercise, followed by a slow, deliberate, ceremonial entry into my studio: windows open, air moving, light shifting.
Each day begins with a ritual of meditation, deep breathing, and repetitive timed drawing and painting exercises that separate me from the outside world and ground me in my space. These rituals sanctify the studio as a sanctuary of freedom.
I start on the floor, surrounded by foraged materials, lengths of thread, beads and detritus. At some point, time loosens and the work begins to lead me. If I leave slightly surprised by what emerged, I know it was been a great day.
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Further Information:
Lineages is on show from 29 January to 28 February 2026, 6 – 8.30pm, at October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AL.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Bev Butkow, Never Static (detail), 2022. Wool, dressmaking scraps, string, ribbon, twine, copper rod, time and labour. 250 x 170 cm. © Bev Butkow. Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery, London.
All further images as credited in photo captions.