Bea Buckland-Willis

Bea Buckland-Willis is a multi-disciplinary textile artist who plays with ideas around feminine labour, institutional power and able-bodiness through the language of ornament. Working across textiles, sculpture and installation, she recontextualises quilting traditions and architectural motifs as methods of destabilisation, challenging normative medicalised understandings of the body. Bringing the intimate labour of textile practice into dialogue with the institutional spaces and symbols that have shaped us, Buckland-Willis creates works that occupy a space between beauty and discomfort, familiarity and estrangement. Her practice considers how ornament can both uphold systems of power and become a site through which those systems are unsettled, allowing inherited cultural forms to be reimagined through reclaimed, often industrial, discarded textiles.