Bryony Shearmur: Cheap Sheets & Soiled Smalls

Colonnade House

Cheap Sheets and Soiled Smalls is a series of hand-embroidered hospital blankets completed between May 2016 and March 2019; each piece inspired by a specific chapter or relationship in Bryony’s life. When Bryony was a child, so the story goes, she would appear each night at the bottom of the stairs declaring that she was going to be a painter, an opera singer, or an architect; maybe a ballerina, a farmer, a dog walker dragon slayer, rock star, designer, traveller… the list went on. She tried them all and loved every moment, but the things that stayed constant were the storytelling, the truth-seeking and the need to be creating, even if it was just a pile of rocks balanced on top of a hill. Bryony’s practice always moved between different mediums, but the three things that have consistently captured her imagination are textiles, the written word and photography. For this exhibition at Colonnade House, Bryony will be showing This One’s for You , a single work from the Cheap Sheets and Soiled Smalls series. Hand embroidered onto a hospital blanket, the piece combines text and textile to tell the story of  a love remembered long after it has ended. It speaks about the intoxicating certainty of young love, the stories we continue telling ourselves, and the impossible temptation to preserve a version of the past that no longer exists. At its heart, the work is also a meditation on ageing, memory, and the quiet grief of living in a culture that so often measures women’s values against youth and beauty. The blanket becomes both comfort and witness; a surface onto which confession, longing and self-reckoning are patiently stitched by hand. The slow process of embroidery mirrors the slow work of remembering, suggesting that some stories cannot simply be told, they have to be lived through one stitch at a time.