Statement

My work focuses on the emotional dimensions in the words loss, absence and grief.

I use textiles in my work as we experience them in all aspects of our everyday lives and have built up a vocabulary not only of words but of feelings and memories which we associate with them. We touch, handle, see, wear and use them. This experience allows us to think about their involvement in containing the history of our lives, our emotions and our memories.

I often use bedsheets as the main fabric in my work, either whole or as fragments.  Bedsheets act as silent witnesses to many natural processes in life such as birth, puberty, pleasure, disease, decay and death. They bear witness to passions spent before sleep and dreams forgotten on waking. Although we endlessly strive to clean and launder them, they remain keepers of our memories, dreams and tears.

New exhibition news

I will be exhibiting a collection of new textile artwork questioning what we remember, how we revisit, refine, reconstruct events and feelings of the past. Why is it that some memories come readily to mind whilst others have to be pieced together from fragments? Do we feel what we felt then or what we felt the last time we remembered?

This exhibition builds on my previous research into emotional barriers and vulnerability, and uses pillowcases and inherited bedsheets to explore and question whether we preserve the past or reconstruct it in the light of the present.

Reviews

‘Beverly’s work locates a feeling, an emotion, in a material object. The work touches us, causes us to stop and look carefully at the surfaces and in doing so we connect to the losses we have all experienced’

Professor Lesley Millar on the exhibition The Language of Grief: cloth as a metaphor for loss. James Hockey Gallery, UCA Farnham, UK. 2016

Torn Apart: exploring emotional barriers, Solo show at Lansdown Gallery, Stroud
See Torn Apart gallery for images of work from the exhibition. An ‘In Conversation’ event was held in the gallery and recorded please click here to view the recording.