Beverly Ayling-Smith

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Previously shown in

Fibre: structure and surface 2022

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Cloth and clay 2024

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Beverly Ayling-Smith is an artist and researcher whose Doctoral thesis examined how cloth can be used as a metaphor for loss and connect with the emotions of the viewer. Beverly has exhibited widely in both the UK and internationally; she has work in the Whitworth Art Gallery collection in the UK and in collections in the USA. 

She has had her research published in the UK and been a speaker at international conferences. She has been an Associate Research Fellow at the International Textile Research Centre at the University for the Creative Arts since 2016.

 

Beverly’s current work continues her exploration of using materials such as bedlinens and pillowcases to question what is memory and how do we remember? The fabrics in this selection of work have been torn, reconstructed, mended, pieced together and layered over each other. They are used as the substrate and metaphor for memories. 

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The rust and ochre palette of some of the works comes from revisiting sketchbooks made during a visit to Kenya and using some of the red soil collected there. This revisiting of a location and connecting to the earth again, layers memories - of people, events and emotions, that have shifted over time.