Tate St Ives opened a new commission by the Turkish artist Gözde İlkin on Friday. "Those Who Remember Their Births" is a site-specific installation developed during two residencies the artist completed in the Cornish town earlier this year, and it runs through January 17, 2027.
İlkin, who was born in Kütahya, Turkey, in 1981, studied painting at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and Marmara University before developing a practice built around sculpture, painting and embroidery. For this commission, she transforms vintage family bedsheets using batik dyeing and wire into wave-shaped sculptural forms suspended through the gallery, adding painted and embroidered details drawn from local plants, stones and coastline. Tate St Ives is showing the work alongside archival photographs documenting women's labor in the fishing, mining and textile industries that shaped the town's history.
Textiles as records
The exhibition treats found domestic textiles — the kind of worn, inherited bedsheets most households eventually discard — as what the gallery's exhibition notes describe as "repositories of memory, capable of preserving experiences and stories that can be absent from written histories." That framing runs through İlkin's broader interest in how coastal geography and human recollection shape each other; the suspended, wave-shaped forms echo the swell and break of the Atlantic visible from the gallery's windows, situating the work in direct dialogue with Porthmeor Beach just outside.
The commission also has a collaborative layer: the artist worked with the Cornwall-based textile artist Jo McIntosh and local participants in workshops examining family histories and collective memory, producing embroidered coverings for stones gathered from nearby shores that now form part of the installation.
The show is curated by Anne Barlow, director of Tate St Ives, with assistant curator Dara McElligott, and is supported by the Istanbul-based arts foundation SAHA. It is the fifth commission produced under a residency and exchange programme run jointly by Tate St Ives and SAHA, which has brought a series of Turkish artists to make new work in the Cornish gallery since the partnership began.
The gallery itself sits directly above Porthmeor Beach, on the site of a former gasworks, giving İlkin's suspended forms a literal view of the water that shapes much of her imagery. "Those Who Remember Their Births" runs at Tate St Ives through January 17, 2027, and admission follows the gallery's standard ticketing for temporary exhibitions.
