Family bedsheets become sea waves in a Tate St Ives show

Old family bedsheets hang in a Cornish gallery, bent into the shape of waves. Istanbul artist Gözde İlkin made them with batik (a dyeing method that uses wax to block colour from parts of the cloth) and wire. The work is a new commission called Those Who Remember Their Births. It fills a space at Tate St Ives until 17 January 2027.

The context

A non-profit group called SAHA backed the commission. It was founded in 2011 to support artists, curators and writers from Türkiye. This is the fifth step in a residency and commissions scheme run with the gallery. Earlier artists were Burçak Bingöl, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Cansu Çakar and Ahmet Doğu İpek.

The programme exists to build artistic exchange and research between St Ives and Türkiye. The residencies take place in the Porthmeor Studios.

How the sheets became the sea

İlkin made the work during two residencies in St Ives in 2026. She came to see the coastline as "a living archive". The wave forms carry paint and embroidery.

The stitching draws on archive photographs of local women who worked in fishing, mining and textile production. Other motifs come from plants, stones and the coast.

A community workshop added a local layer. İlkin worked with St Ives textile artist Jo McIntosh and local people. Together they made embroidered coverings for stones gathered from the shore. Those stones are part of the work.

The release names six contributors: Valerie Canavan, Ebby Rae Cotterill, Freya Cotterill-Prisk, Denise Morris, Gamze Polat and Julie Tesseyman.

The artist

İlkin was born in 1981 in Kütahya and lives in Istanbul. She finished a painting degree at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in 2004. Her solo show Tide opened at artSümer Gallery in Istanbul in 2026.

Cloth has long been her way into memory. "Found materials have their own layers of memory," she told ArtAsiaPacific in 2018. In that talk she also called fabric "a ground or a stage" for her ideas. The interview covers earlier work, not this show.

Plan a visit

The gallery stands on Porthmeor Beach in St Ives. It is open daily from 10.00 to 17.20. From 1 November, it opens Tuesday to Sunday, from 10.00 to 16.20. Entry to the show is included with a ticket.

Visitors aged 16 to 25 can see every exhibition for £5 through Tate Collective. Cornwall residents can get year-round entry for £10. A paperback catalogue costs £5.

Our view

We like how a plain household object becomes the sea. Sheets keep the marks of the people who slept under them, and the show treats that as a kind of memory.

I once lost a fight with a fitted sheet, so this feels personal.

Would you visit?