Beverly Ayling-Smith uses textiles from our everyday lives to create her work that focuses on the emotional dimensions of loss, absence, and grief. Her experience in research into emotional barriers and vulnerability influences her designs and work, giving the viewer a reason to stop and look closely at the details.
Does your work have stories to tell? Are there hidden meanings or messages in your work? Is there an overarching theme that connects all of your work?
Rather than a visual narrative, my work has an abstract poetic narrative in that I am trying to convey emotions, particularly of loss and grief. Through my work I try to make a connection with the emotions of the viewer and spark an emotional reaction, or perhaps help with their mourning process.
How did you find your creative niche?
While studying for my BA (Hons) degree in Embroidered Textiles I struggled with making work that looked ‘nice’, I always felt that there had to be meaning behind what I was making even if it was a sample. I needed to know why and what it was trying to say. That all changed when I saw the work of artist Rozanne Hawksley in an exhibition. It made me realise that the message and the choice of materials is just as, if not more, important than the work itself. This realisation allowed me to give myself ‘permission’ to make work that had a theoretical underpinning and, from my perspective, give it a more thoughtful substance.
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What different creative media do you use in your work?
I prefer to use natural materials particularly those associated with burial in my work – lead and linen, and more recently bedsheets because of their association with the ancient practice of burying people in a winding sheet as well as the fact that they are witness to so many emotional events in our lives – birth, love, and passion as well as illness, death and grief. I often subject my work to unpredictable processes – sometimes after many hours of stitching – like covering the piece in chalk, ash, or bitumen, burning it or burying it in the ground.
Describe your creative space.
About 5 years ago we moved to a village in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire, UK. It has an annexe in the garden, built in 2015 by the previous owners for an elderly relative although it was never occupied. It was an empty space about 17 feet by 20 feet and so I have been making the downstairs area into my workspace and the upstairs into a guest suite since we moved in. It’s a bit of a ’work-in-progress’ in itself – we had to live in it for about a month during renovations and extension on the main house when we had no water.
Currently I have my desk with computer and printer in one corner and an 8 feet x 5 feet work table in the centre of the room. The ‘legs’ of the table are actually wire basket drawer units so I can have my tools and materials close at hand. I had cupboards built under the stairs which have long shelves in for more storage and the doors in front have no handles so that I can pin or tape work up and stand back to see it from a distance. (There is a video of me talking about my work in my studio is on Vimeo https://vimeo.com/490907040?share=copy)
Do you use a sketchbook or journal? How does that help your work develop?
My undergraduate degree was in Microbiology and after graduating I worked in antibiotic research and in hospital acquired infection. I feel that my sketchbooks often resemble experiment lab notebooks as I make lists – with accompanying sketches – of pieces I want to try and make, or thoughts and phrases from my reading, mind maps and different samples – permutations of colours and textures. Once I’ve started sampling, I will have a list of what worked in this piece, what else could I try, what was good about it as well as what didn’t work. So my sketchbooks don’t necessarily have beautiful sketches in, but they are more a record of my feelings and thought processes about a body of work.
How often do you start a new project? Do you work actively on more than one project at a time?
I don’t have a set schedule for starting new work – I’ve done some solo shows to a particular subject matter, for example in 2020 I had a show called ‘Torn apart: exploring emotional barriers’ This was an opportunity to create work that moved my research on from my doctoral research on mourning and melancholia to a new area.
After that I spent time researching memory and how we remember past events. This led to a show called ‘Layers of Memory: holding on + letting go’ in 2023. Each body of work was an opportunity to progress my own thinking and led to new writing as well as textile work.
Can you tell us about the inspiration and process of one of your works? How does a new work come about?
Usually after reading and researching I will have pages of notes and will select some words that I feel are important. For example, in Freud’s writing ‘On Mourning and Melancholia’ he suggests that eventually the wound caused by loss will, through the process of mourning or grief-work be healed but leave an emotional scar. In contrast, melancholia could be thought of as an open wound that never heals.
The presence of a visible scar is an indication of life experience – I felt that a textile analogy for this would be the visible patching and mending of fabrics, giving a sense of making whole. And so in response to this I created this series of textile pieces which I called ‘The Healing Series’.
The three pieces respond to the different stages in the mourning process. Each piece is around 1 metre 90 centimetres high and about 45 centimetres wide – roughly equating to the size of a body.
The series starts with a length of cloth that has been torn and then held together using lead sutures kept in place with thread. With the tear in the shape of an autopsy incision, the colour, brutality of the stitching and the incomplete mend act as a metaphor for when grief is at its most raw.
The second of the three pieces is slightly lighter in colour, the tears have been mended with stitch but are still very visible on the surface of the cloth.
And in the third the tears are mended and embedded in the surface. Acting as a metaphor for the hurts and wounds that are embedded in our lives and make up the fabric of a person.
Each of these pieces was trialled on a smaller scale several times before what I felt was the right method to use for each one was reached. The first way of making something is often only the beginning – some pieces have different iterations before I come to the final version.
What piece of work makes you most proud? Why?
Probably the piece that makes me most proud would be the work entitled ‘remembering, repeating and working through’. It was made for an exhibition in 2012, in Gallery 1853 in Salts Mill, Saltaire in Yorkshire, UK, a huge building on the outskirts of Bradford which has a spinning room a quarter of a mile long. The piece is 3m high by 5m wide (around 10 feet wide by about 17 feet). It was made to fill an entire wall of the gallery, and when you stood up close to examine the detail of the surface it completely filled your field of vision. It was made from black Holland linen that had been torn into strips and sanded to create holes. The strips were then waxed and stitched together, and a web of long stitches covered the surface. This piece was made in response to Sigmund Freud’s description of how we remove emotional ties to someone who has died. Memories are repeatedly brought to mind to confirm that the loved one is no longer there and that future events will now happen without them. The large size of the piece reflects on the overwhelming nature of grief in its first days.
When the exhibition was opened a man took me by the arm and walked me over to the piece – he hadn’t read any of the exhibition information describing what the piece was about, or the title of the piece – but he absolutely understood what it was about. It later transpired that his wife, to whom he had been married for 60 years, had just died and he felt that it expressed his grief exactly. He later wrote to me about his experience of seeing the work for the first time:
‘There was no symmetry to the black patches or groups of patches, nor any sense of order to the tearing revealing the white beyond the black surface, whilst a network of threads criss-crossing the piece appeared to be constraining impending breakup. A metaphor for my grieving, for my state of emotional destruction and my efforts to find my ‘way through’. I saw myself on that black wall. It spoke to the bruised and raw ME within me, wallowing in the damage to that mutual love of sixty years; love that had been obliterated’
I think that this is what made me proud, that the piece communicated its meaning without any words being necessary. This piece is now in the Whitworth Art Gallery’s prestigious collection of Contemporary Textiles in Manchester and has been shown there several times.
What do you do to keep yourself motivated and interested in your work?
By continually revising and refining my research. I love the research element in my work – which is why I went down the academic route of an MA followed by a PhD – the research informed my studio practice and vice versa.
Which part of the design process is your favourite? Which part is a challenge for you?
Researching my subject and writing about it are always the starting point. I need to know what I am trying to say in each piece, and I can’t know that without doing some thorough academic investigations. This usually leads to a number of ideas that I can sample and work through.
The part I like least is the finishing off and framing – if it needs framing. It always takes more time than I think it will and I am impatient to be finished and move on.
When it comes to creating, are you more of a planner or an improviser?
That depends on the piece – ideas for some pieces come into my mind almost fully formed – the size, colour how it is going to look, even the title sometimes but others grow in my mind – I may have a pencil outline sketch in my sketchbook, and I start it according to the sketch, but it evolves as it is created. Sometimes I can get part way through a piece and realise it isn’t communicating what I am trying to say – then there is the decision of whether to persevere or start again.
How do you know when a piece or project is finished and needs no additional work?
That’s a tricky one! Sometimes the final unpredictable element like ash or chalk is the final stage but there is always something more to do – some minor adjustments to be made. If the final stage is stitch, I tend to prop the piece up on a surface and have it near me while I start the next piece – sometimes I will look at it in passing and something will jump out that’s not quite right and I can add more.
Where can people see your work?
I put information about my upcoming exhibitions on my website and I write a very occasional newsletter about my new work. You can subscribe to this from my website.
My published academic writing is also available through my website under the ‘media links’ tab and there are also links to interviews and videos.
The piece ‘remembering repeating and working through’ is in the Whitworth Art Gallery and has been shown in exhibitions several times but is not on permanent display.
Publications
Images of my work can be seen in the following publications:
o ‘Warp and Weft, Chain Stitch and Pearl: Textiles in the Ahmanson Collection’ Exhibition catalogue 2015 Pinatubo Press
o ‘Art_Textiles’ Exhibition catalogue 2015 The Whitworth, University of Manchester
o ‘Fragmentation and Repair for Mixed-Media and Textile Artists’ by Shelley Rhodes 2021 Published by Batsford
o ‘Embroidering the Everyday: Found, Stitch Paint’ by Cas Holmes 2021 Published by Batsford.
Website: www.beverlyaylingsmith.com
Instagram: @BeverlyAS1
Interview posted June 2024
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