Tate St Ives turns Gözde İlkin’s family bedsheets into waves that remember the town’s women

A bedsheet keeps a family’s history without ever being asked to. It is washed, mended and handed down, and it absorbs births, fevers and ordinary nights in a way no ledger does. The Istanbul artist Gözde İlkin has built her practice on that premise, painting and stitching onto found tablecloths, curtains and sheets. Her new commission for Tate St Ives carries it to the edge of the Atlantic: vintage family bedsheets, dyed with batik and bent with wire into waves that hang in the air of the gallery.

Those Who Remember Their Births is a site-specific installation of sculpture, painting and embroidery that İlkin developed across two residencies in the Cornish town. Tate describes an artist who came to read the coastline as a living archive, a place where waves, wind and tides keep rewriting the land and where geological and human histories fold into one another. The suspended forms are shaped to move like water, and their folds, painted and embroidered, become surfaces for storytelling.

Tate St Ives above Porthmeor Beach seen across the Atlantic swell — Porthmeor Beach and Tate St Ives from the sea. Photo: Lewis Clarke (CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

The decisive choice is whose stories those folds hold. İlkin worked from archival photographs of St Ives women whose labour in fishing, mining and textile production shaped the town’s social and industrial life, and she threads them through motifs drawn from plants, stones and the shoreline. It is a quiet correction to the St Ives most visitors come for, the town of modern art that the gallery was built to tell. Here its history is carried by women who seldom reached the written record, which is exactly the gap İlkin believes domestic cloth can fill.

The piece is collaborative by design. With St Ives textile artist Jo McIntosh and a group of local participants, İlkin ran a workshop on family histories and local knowledge, and together they embroidered coverings for stones gathered from the nearby shore. Those stones now sit inside the installation. The method suits an artist who co-ran the Istanbul initiative Atıl Kunst with Gülçin Aksoy and Yasemin Nur, and whose solo exhibitions have travelled from PARIS-B in Paris to Gypsum Gallery in Cairo and the MAC/VAL museum outside Paris.

The commission is the fifth chapter of the Artist Residency and Commissions Programme between Tate St Ives and SAHA, the Istanbul non-profit that supports artists from Türkiye, following Burçak Bingöl, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Cansu Çakar and Ahmet Doğu İpek. It is curated by Anne Barlow, director of Tate St Ives, with assistant curator Dara McElligott.

Gözde İlkin: Those Who Remember Their Births runs at Tate St Ives, on Porthmeor Beach, from 10 October 2026 to 17 January 2027. İlkin gives an artist talk on opening day, free with admission, and a short paperback publication accompanies the show. Tate Members enter free, visitors aged 16 to 25 pay £5 through Tate Collective, and Cornwall residents can buy a £10 year-round pass that also covers the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden.

For a gallery whose windows open onto the surf, the gesture is a fitting inversion. The sea comes indoors, and it arrives made of sheets that once covered someone’s bed.

Tags: installations, Gözde İlkin, SAHA, St Ives, Tate St Ives, textile art