Speaker: Louise Saxton, artist

My name’s Louise Saxton and I’m a mixed media and assemblage artist and I work with discarded materials from the home. The Linen Project is an exhibition that has been several decades in the collecting and the past two and a half years in the making. For the past twelve years I’ve been working primarily with discarded needlework, so mostly twentieth century household linens.

It is an exhibition which celebrates not only the exquisite embroidery and lace that I am known for working with but also the beautiful materiality of the linens themselves. I’m interested in the way in which linens are important to care, both within the domestic setting of the home but also in the clinical setting of the hospital and the hospice and so there’s a major work which is titled Rest, within the exhibition, which is an installation on an antique hospital bed. This installation I worked on over a period of six months in my main studio in East Kew and it was made as a wall work but then transferred onto the bed. It depicts a resting figure based on an ancient marble sculpture and it is constructed of thousands of pieces of reclaimed embroidery and thousands of pins.