New Work by Sarah Burgess for UNmaking

The Textile Study Group’s UNmaking exhibition opens this September in Stroud. Here, artist Sarah Burgess offers an insight into her deeply reflective new pieces—exploring how family heritage, the ritual of everyday textiles, and the personal experience of grief came together to shape these textiles. Visitors can expect a powerful body of work that is as visually exquisite as it is emotionally resonant.

The Comfort and Legacy of Cloth

Finding a Personal Connection

When we were given the theme of UNmaking as a starting point for our work for the current Textile Study Group exhibition, I was at a low point in my life, having recently cared for my husband before he died and taken on full caring responsibility for a dependent relative.

I felt unmaking was an inventive and stimulating theme, but I couldn’t immediately see a way in which I could make it feel relevant to me. Yes, I could unpick something, but somehow that wasn’t enough; it needed to feel personal.

The Legacy of Lancashire Cotton

In the back of a set of deep shelves, I have a collection of rather huge, heavy, pure cotton sheets that came into my mother’s family through her father, my Grandpa. Frank Heywood worked in the Lancashire cotton trade all his life, starting as an office boy at the age of 14 in Oldham, on the north-eastern edge of Manchester. There were many cotton mills in Oldham and my Granny’s family were also all connected to the cotton trade, as was almost everyone working in the area.

Frank gradually moved into sales and would stand at the Cotton Exchange in Manchester on a Thursday buying cotton fibre and selling the finished cloth for his firm. He had a small, beautifully made folding lens on a stand that tucked into his waistcoat pocket and allowed him to examine the staple length of cotton fibre. The mills that Frank worked for made cotton corduroy, but other mills in the group made sheeting, and it was through work that he was able to buy cotton sheets at a reduced price.

When my mother died, as well as sheets in use, I found parcels of sheets still in their original brown paper wrappings tied with string. Inside the parcels the sheets themselves were always tied up in a particular ribbon that my Granny had lengths of in her ‘string drawer’. The sheets themselves are fresh and lovely to sleep on but are a hard job to iron – if you like your bedding smooth.

I’ve always loved the shadows and creases that are formed on crumpled cloth, and I have previously used this as a way of building texture into my printed textiles. I had photographed the creased cotton sheets that I used on my husband’s bed; they seemed to sum up at the time the way I was feeling and the light and shadow in my life.

I had felt for some time that I should use some of the sheets in my textile work, both to use something I already had and to reference the legacy of cotton in my family and in Lancashire.

Making, Unmaking, and Absence

The first venue for UNmaking, at Goldsmiths College, was a relatively small space, and so using large cotton sheets was not an option. I didn’t want to cut them up, but a pillowcase seemed a possibility.

Making a bed and changing sheets is something that we do as a matter of course without thinking. We make the bed then unmake it during the night, night after night after night for years and years. We plump the pillow, shaking out the feathers from the weight of the head, the weight of memory. We smooth the sheet and shake the duvet. In that first year of being on my own, the sunken dip in my pillow began to speak to me of another absence and the evaporation of my dreams and memories each morning.

Capturing Dreams and Memory

Our Textile Study Group cyanotype workshop with the artist Hannah Lamb, in spring 2025, came just at the right time and gave me a way into representing what I wanted to say using cloth. I began to experiment with shadow effects using crumpled semi-transparent silk as a mask over the cyanotype to create a drifting, evaporating atmosphere of dreams and memories; I didn’t want clear images.

Much of Julian’s and my life has been bound up with where we live in an old industrial valley. Once a hive of activity, ingenuity, and hard and dangerous work, it’s now a series of romantic ruins amongst trees, waterfalls, rocks, and ponds. As an architect, Julian also volunteered in the conservation of the remaining mill structures. He worked with me and many others for years to care for the natural environment and interpret the history and importance of the valley for visitors.

I used the idea of a stitched, dream-like map of the valley with layered images from Julian’s plans of our house in my first pillow in 2025. I kept the stitch detailing mostly subtle in tones of blue, similar to the cyanotype, so that exhibition visitors would have to come close and find the detailing for themselves. I hadn’t thought I would make a second pillow, but encountering Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter connected with my thoughts and began to form an idea.The hollow in the second pillow is filled with feathers. These feathers are stitched in place, but if loose they would be drifting everywhere, impossible to catch and pin down, just like our dreams.

In Conversation with Sarah Burgess

Did working with your inherited sheets—still tied in your grandmother’s original ribbons—feel like a collaboration across generations? 

I think it may do when I use the sheets that are still in their original wrappings – I have a slightly different idea about those from the one I am working on at the moment – but that may or may not get explored in time for our next exhibition, Implement. Granny’s string drawer, that she kept the odd scraps of ribbon in, also had safety pin snakes of pins all clipped in long lines. There were folded paper bags and lots of rubber bands. I remember the smell of her kitchen drawer. My Granny, Mona Heywood, was a painter of flowers and landscapes and had attended classes at Manchester School of Art. I remember her teaching my sister and I how to paint in oils after we had been out drawing with her, at 12 years old I realised that oil painting was much more complicated than Painting by Numbers.

Bed linen carries such a deep connection to intimacy and loss. Did working with a material tied to daily routine change how you view the cotton fabric itself? 

We often take domestic textiles for granted, tea towels, dusters, bathroom towels; we use them, wash them use them again – over and over and over until they get demoted to dustsheets or cleaning cloths, or dog towels. I’m always drawn to the feel of cloth whether new or old; its tactile quality. Much has been written about our lifelong relationship and interaction with cloth from birth to death; the comfort of a shawl or wool blanket, the feel of a new pair of socks. These pure cotton sheets carry so many messages for me, which ones will I choose to explore? Family, industry, geographical, sociological, cotton trade, slavery. Whatever I choose, the viewer will add their own background and narratives to the work.

Stitching down feathers feels like an attempt to hold onto something that naturally wants to float away. Was securing them an act of trying to create some order to your memories? You write about evaporating dreams—did the physical act of making these pieces help anchor those fleeting thoughts? 

At the time that I made the second pillow I don’t think I had connected the stitching down of the feathers with tying down memories, it was more of a practical necessity. I wanted to use feathers because they are fragile, light, barely there. Yes, they do tend to drift off, like my dreams. It also felt a bit cheeky as there had originally been a query as to whether my pillow needed to be frozen to eliminate any possible bacteria in the filling of my feather pillows before going on show. So, also using feathers on the outside seemed just a tiny bit anarchic.

By using subtle blue-on- blue stitching, you invite the viewer to look closely. How do you navigate sharing such private grief in a public exhibition space? 

Deciding what to share and what is private are very individual decisions that each person navigates for themselves. I intentionally gave the first pillow a title that spoke of dreams and slippery memories but I didn’t mention loss. I felt that anyone who knew me would know where the work was originating, other people might guess or read the work differently. We all encounter the loss in our lives. We have to accept that viewers of our work will bring their own ideas to a piece and it may have a different meaning for them than the one we intended because of their own experiences. I couldn’t have explored these questions or written this text last year, in time for the first showing of Unmaking, my thoughts and emotions were too raw and confused.

Looking back to when you felt "unmade" at the start of this project, how has creating these works shifted your relationship to that theme?

I think with any loss of a person there has to be a period of working out who we are now in a different life situation, a readjustment. We had been together for a long time. We were very young when we married. We had so many interests in common and a similar design aesthetic but I also have my own work and friends, which gives continuity and a lifeline when everything else seems to be falling apart. I usually find that spending time alone working; drawing, making, writing, reading, gives my brain the space to make connections and explore ideas that would not otherwise have occurred to me. The problem then is to decide which path to follow and not to try to carry too many ideas in one piece of work. This is not so easy now that the person I bounced ideas on is not around.

Working on my first piece for UNmaking, Sweet Dreams are Made of This, last year, was a huge help in coming to terms with what had happened to my life. Once I had a starting point I could just stitch and let the repetition take me over, stilling my thoughts and allowing space for ideas to come. Making the piece just felt like something I had to do to reassure myself that I would be okay – I could still create.

Exhibition Details

Experience the full Unmaking exhibition at Stroud's Museum in the Park, featuring a series of workshops led by our featured artists, including Sarah. 

• Exhibition: UNmaking
• Dates: 12 September – 8 November 2026
• Location: Museum in the Park, Stroud
• Admission: Free