More than thirty years after I made my commemorative panel for Rudolf Nureyev, it has returned to a part of London connected to my early life as an artist.
In 2026, Quilt 23 of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt was selected for Body and Mind, one of the new displays at Queer Britain, the UK’s national LGBTQ+ museum at Granary Square, King’s Cross. The display explores queer experiences of health, illness and disability, including the profound impact of AIDS and the stigma surrounding it.
I went to see it there.
It looked beautiful.
And yet seeing it produced the same strange sensation I increasingly experience whenever the quilt reappears somewhere new. My name isn’t on the museum label. Nor are the names of the other makers whose hands created the seven panels surrounding mine.
To the museum visitor it is AIDS Quilt 23, a remarkable collective object of remembrance.
I see something else as well.
I see my stitches.
The Material Geography of a Quilt
Looking at the Nureyev panel now, I can reconstruct another London through its materials.
I remember buying fabric on Parkway in Camden Town. As a young artist, fabric shops were part of the infrastructure of making. At art school we were encouraged to explore the fabric shops of Berwick Street, but I developed my own relationship with the more affordable shops around Camden: places I returned to, browsed and gradually came to know.
This kind of gathering rarely enters the history of an artwork. We record where artists studied, where they exhibited and which museums subsequently displayed their work, but less often where they found the materials from which the work was actually made.
Yet for a young artist, these local economies of cloth, haberdashery, offcuts and affordable materials can help shape a practice. What can you afford? What catches your eye? What do you discover because you happen to walk into a particular shop on a particular day?
My Nureyev panel contains something of that material geography. Some of its fabric came from Camden. The ruby-red embellishments came from the trimmings and haberdashery district of central Athens. Before these materials became a memorial, they belonged to shops, streets and journeys.
The pink velvet, gold lamé, crystals and dotted boots with their golden wings are also unmistakably of the person I was in my twenties. Looking at them now, I recognise my younger self through her choices.
Before an artwork has an exhibition history, it has a material history: where its components came from, what they cost, who sold them, why the artist noticed them and what journeys brought them into the studio.
Perhaps gathering is part of making too.
Returning to King’s Cross
There is something particularly strange about encountering these materials again at Queer Britain.
I studied Foundation at Central Saint Martins in 1990, when it was still at Charing Cross Road. The college is now at King’s Cross, close to Queer Britain and Coal Drops Yard, while the fabric landscape through which I learnt to make has changed almost beyond recognition.
The quilt has therefore returned to a geography connected to my formation as an artist, but the city around it is different.
So am I.
The stitches aren’t.
The Name Disappears. The Hand Remains.
Standing in front of the quilt raises a question I was never taught to expect at art school.
What happens to authorship when an artwork becomes collective memory?
I made the Nureyev panel as part of something deliberately larger than myself. The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt commemorates people who died during the AIDS epidemic through an extraordinary collective act of making, love and remembrance. Its power comes partly from individual acts becoming part of a greater whole.
I understand that.
But there is nevertheless something strange about standing in a museum in front of something my hands made and finding that my name has disappeared from its public interpretation.
The maker is absent from the label but everywhere in the object.
I can recognise decisions that would be invisible to anybody else. I know why one fabric sits beside another. I recognise the stitches. I remember finding the materials. I can see my taste, my hand and something of my life at the time.
The experience has made me think differently about authorship, particularly in relation to objects made from cloth.
If this were a painting, would we be as comfortable not knowing who made it?
There is no simple answer. Many historical paintings are anonymous too. But textiles have a particularly complicated relationship with authorship. Stitching, quilting and embroidery have frequently been understood as domestic, collective or craft practices, and the identities of those who physically made historic works have often disappeared.
The Bayeux Tapestry is perhaps the most famous example. Almost a thousand years after it was made, we still don’t know the identities of the people whose hands stitched its extraordinary images.
Were they simply executing somebody else’s design? Or did their decisions about thread, colour, tension, rhythm and stitch constitute part of the artwork itself?
Looking at my own stitches in a museum makes that question unexpectedly personal.
The name can disappear.
The hand remains.
An Artwork with a Life of Its Own
Perhaps the strangest part of my relationship with the Nureyev panel is that it now seems to have an exhibition life almost entirely separate from me.
It travels.
It has appeared at Tate Modern, travelled elsewhere in Britain, and now hangs at Queer Britain. I sometimes discover where it is going only after decisions have been made.
This is unlike most of my other work. Paintings and installations normally return to the studio or remain connected to me through the practical business of storing, transporting, installing and exhibiting them.
The quilt doesn’t need me anymore.
Other people look after it, transport it, conserve it, select it and decide how it will be displayed. Museums change around it. Curators place it within new narratives. New audiences encounter it.
The physical object remains the same, but its meanings continue accumulating.
It has acquired an independent biography.
Where Do Materials Come From?
Much of my later work has asked what happens to materials after we no longer want them.
That question eventually became explicit in works such as Billboard Skirts, where discarded carrier bags became colour, image and paint.
Looking again at the Nureyev panel has made me think about the other end of that material journey.
Where do the things we make with come from?
Materials don’t simply appear in studios.
Artists find them, save for them, stumble across them, carry them home, inherit them, reuse them and develop relationships with the places that supply them. Those networks—shops, markets, streets, manufacturers, friends, families and journeys—form an ecology around making.
And those ecologies change.
The London in which I gathered the materials for this quilt has largely disappeared. But fragments of it remain embedded in the object.
The cloth from Camden is still there.
The embellishments from Athens are still there.
The stitches I made in my twenties are still there.
What Remains
There is another form of anonymity within Quilt 23 itself. One of its memorial panels remains concealed in accordance with the wishes of a family who did not want the identity of their loved one publicly revealed. It is a powerful reminder of the stigma that surrounded AIDS and of the very different reasons a name might disappear.
I would not equate that anonymity with the anonymity of a maker. They belong to entirely different histories.
But their presence within the same object makes me conscious of how complicated acts of naming and remembering can be.
Who is remembered?
Who does the remembering?
Who makes the object through which that memory survives?
And who is named when it enters the museum?
Perhaps that is one of the unexpected things this quilt has taught me.
I used to think that making an artwork meant sending something of myself out into the world.
With this quilt, I have discovered something stranger.
First I travelled and gathered its materials.
Then I made them into an artwork.
Now the artwork travels without me.
Museums change around it. Audiences change. The stories told around it change. I have changed too.
But the stitches haven’t.
I can still see exactly where my hands were.
Exhibition
UK AIDS Memorial Quilt 23 — Body and Mind
Queer Britain
Granary Square, King’s Cross, London
2026
Rudolf Nureyev, 1994
Panel by Emma Neuberg
Pink velvet, gold lamé, appliqué, crystal embellishment and stitch
Part of Quilt 23, UK AIDS Memorial Quilt