Tabs BW
In Tabs BW’s creations, pixels become stitches. Just as each brushstroke on a canvas makes up its subject, so too does every stitch Tabs makes recreate the fundamentals by which we understand a digital image. However, Tabs’s work is about un-digitizing, and therefore about challenging the boundaries between digital and physical, the personal and the shared.
Tabs BW, Grieving with Pixelated Bodies (detail), 2021-2022. Photo Courtesy: the artist.
A 28-year old artist from Cornwall, Tabs works in photography and sculptural embroidery. After completing her MRes from the Royal College of Art in Fine Arts and Humanities in 2022, Tabs has gone on to establish a practice that spans across London to Cornwall. Most recently, her work Loving a disappearing image (2023-2024) was featured in the Tate Modern in the exhibition Inside Job, the Tate Staff Biennale.
Tabs BW, Loving a disappearing image, 2023-2024. Cross-stitch on cotton, cardboard, paper, thermal print. Photo Courtesy: the artist.
The ethos of her practice is perhaps best brought into focus through in the act of embracing, the loved one disappears (2024)—a sculptural piece that exemplifies the emotional and conceptual layering behind her works. Especially in cross-stitched images like this, the form itself becomes part of the message: here, a Mobius strip—a surface with only one side and one edge—twists the stitched image so that the viewer only catches glimpses of intertwined hands and fingers, visible only when observations from both a close, intimate perspective and from a distance are taken together.
“I love Saul Leiter,” Tabs explains. “Then, separately, I really loved Lygia Clarke’s Mobius strips, and then those two ideas came together.” The image she stitched for this piece is cropped from a photograph by Leiter, but its transformation through embroidery and form pushes it beyond appropriation—it becomes an emotional object. The title of the piece came later, inspired by a reflection from Musa Mayer, Philip Guston’s daughter: “She was talking about her relationship with her mother and how she actually understood it less because of how close they were. Whereas her dad being distant, she saw him clearly.” The idea that things become less clear the closer you look inspired the use of the Mobius strip—a form that turns that concept into a literal visual experience for the viewer.
Tabs BW, in the act of embracing, the loved one disappears, 2024. cross-stitch on cotton. Video courtesy: the artist.
Originally stitched flat, the image seemed clear but unsatisfying. “I was in a crit before I made it into a Mobius strip, and people were saying, ‘oh, it's kind of a shame to twist it because you can't really see it properly.’ But then, that's the point,” Tabs notes. “Giving it this title has validated my intention to make it into a Mobius strip... had I just put that flat and framed it, for me, that wouldn’t be interesting enough. I wanted it to be more sculptural.”
In in the act of embracing, the loved one disappears, Tabs complicates the notion of visibility and intimacy—not just in the image, but in our relationship to it—inviting viewers to consider how closeness can obscure rather than clarify, and how memory, like the thread she uses, can twist and re-form.
Tabs BW, in the act of embracing, the loved one disappears, 2024. cross-stitch on cotton. Photo and video courtesy: the artist.
To our discussion, Tabs had brought stacks and stacks of her finished notebooks from the past three years. There were over 20 in total, and each one filled to the brim with ideas, fragments of quotes she’s seen in gallery interpretations, and sketches. If one were to flip through them all, they would discover the titles for most of her finished works. One would also uncover titles for those works she hasn’t started yet, but are fully conceptualised and ready for stitching when she gets around to it: “It's a constant need to be sewing something. I constantly need to have my mindless activity of stitching. And that has meant that I made some work that is maybe more simple, like a square image.”
Words, then, mean a lot to Tabs’s practice. She is frequently seen writing down snippets of sentences and phrases from the books she reads or the gallery interpretations next to her favourite artworks: “I think it started with my degree at RCA. We did a workshop about referencing systems and how citation could be a form of care, but how making reference to whom you're drawing from can be a caring practice that honours where you've got your inspiration from. I am really inspired by the active practice of being grateful to all the other people's creativity that I get to consume. That's a big reason why I make art at all: to hopefully be inspiring to other people and also absorb other people's inspiration.”
Tabs’s work is constantly evolving. For the exhibition Well Worn at SET Ealing, she first encountered the need for her works to enter the sculptural realm. The show required all the art displayed to be wearable by visitors. Tabs made two sashes with iPhone-screen-shaped embroideries fastened with thermal receipt paper, entitled, Sun flare & Soft focus (2023). In fitting the brief for this exhibition, she discovered both that she liked the tactical nature of her sculptural works, and how people interacted with them, but disliked the platicky quality of the 3D printed iPhone cases that framed her embroidery.
Tabs BW, Sun flare, 2023. Photo Courtesy: the artist.
Sun flare & Soft focus being appreciated at the Well Worn exhibition in SET Ealing, 2023. Photo Courtesy: Tabs BW.
“Even though my work is so much about the digital, I don't want there to be too much digital about it. That's my whole issue: the lack of feeling, the lack of emotion, the incompatibility, and the lack of intimacy that I get from digital things. Images being digital, and images of things that I love and care about being digital.”
Reacting against the rigidity of the plastic, Tabs’s next work, to recognise the kind of sensation that has produced the image (2024) is entirely soft linen and thermal paper. The work unfolds like an envelope to reveal the inspiration inside, this time from Slovak digital artist and activist Anna Daučíková. This work was featured in the exhibition Make Yourself at Home at Hweg Gallery in Penzance, Cornwall.
Tabs BW, to recognise the kind of sensation that has produced the image, 2024. Cross-stitch on linen, thermal print. Photo Courtesy: the artist.
Someone whose work is about pixels in the least digital way possible, Tabs’s practice ultimately invites a slower, more attentive way of engaging with images. Through embroidered works that reference and reframe digital photographs, she questions the clarity and immediacy we often expect from visual media. For her, referencing is a deliberate and ethical part of making—an acknowledgment of influence as a form of transparency and respect. By translating pixels into thread and images into objects, she disrupts the expectation of clarity and resolution. Instead, her practice opens space for complexity, partial views, and the layered nature of perception.
Learn more about Tabs’s work on her website.
Last December, Tabs kindly made a portrait work of MADE IN BED’s Editor-In-Chief Mairi Alice Dun, entitled is she a picture, or a reflection in a mirror? (2024).
Mairi Alice Dun
Editor-In-Chief, MADE IN BED