The *Hinterlands* exhibition of Louise Bennetts, installed at Mote102 in Leith (photograph: Murray Orr).

Layers of white and transparent fabric are bound, hemmed and piped onto one another, their overlaps building into opacity, filtering the light to create discrete tones of material. Across the textiles, the conjoining lines wander into soft curves, or corral themselves into grids, tracing a cartography across remnants of fabric plucked from waste streams and sewn back into meaning.

This is Hinterlands, an exhibition by designer Louise Bennetts, currently on display at the not-for-profit Mote102 space in Leith, north Edinburgh. Throughout the space – which is based in a former chemist’s, the traces of whose shelves and signage remain as a patina on the walls – Bennetts has assembled her patchwork material into garments, panels and wallhangings, the forms of which all speak to ideas surrounding memory and transformation – that of the material itself, but also of the places and people touched by it. Across Bennetts’ work, different elements of textiles, and the narratives that they bring with them, are brought together and bound in place to create new work. “The construction is also the composition technique,” she explains.

Hinterlands, an exhibition intended to reveal elements of Bennetts’ practice and process, has a dual origin. “Originally, the only thing I knew was the materials, because I'd been to the space before and thought I could do something nice there,” Bennetts explains. Mote102, which was founded by Alice Bain in 2019 as a space to host work by artists, makers and gardeners, is a space which has sought to preserve its history as a community resource in Leith. “You can still see where the sign from when it was a chemist was outside,” Bennetts explains, with exhibitors in Mote102 forbidden from drilling into its interior walls in order to preserve the traces of its former use. Bennetts, whose work across fashion design relies heavily on materials sourced from waste streams, as well as exploring parallels between garments and architecture, felt a kinship with this approach, and sensed an opportunity to exhibit work whose construction might speak of the processes through which textiles come into being. “I felt I could could install something in Mote that would work with both the space and also with my own aesthetic,” she explains.

This story, however, soon became entangled with another. In 2025, Bennetts’ grandmother Nessie Smith died in Silverknowes, a district of Edinburgh some 6km west from Leith – the place where she was born. Over the course of her life, Smith had lived in six addresses, all based in the north of Edinburgh, slowly wending her way westward towards Silverknowes. “All of these addresses were just behind the coast, so you can't actually see the sea from any of them, much as they're on the northern edge of Edinburgh,” Bennetts explains. “Out of curiosity, I just started going to them with this slightly romantic notion that maybe I could go and touch the stones of where she lived, but that absolutely was not the case. It had been completely redeveloped. But that's very much what happens in these places – they regenerate.”

Across these site visits, Bennetts began to take drawings of building elevations, extracting cartographical lines of how one might walk between the different addresses. “Often these are paths that don’t come up on a map,” Bennetts adds. “There’re the little pedestrian routes woven between them.” These pathways, in turn, were then stitched into the Hinterlands’ textiles, the geometries of which are derived from the urban fabric of Smith’s north Edinburgh, but rendered transient and abstract through Bennetts’ transparent fabrics. A set of room dividers, created in conjunction with woodworker Kirsty McKain of Henn, creates a veil through the centre of Mote102 – a woven surface that shifts between the history of Smith’s life and the contemporary realities of Bennetts’ practice as played out in the same area in which her grandmother lived. “I started to realise that maybe these two stories could be working towards the same thing,” says Bennetts, “and that actually, much as I knew that I had an interesting material palette, what’s more compelling is the personal narrative.”

The story of Smith may be personal, but is also couched in broader narratives around the transformation of a place over time, just as Bennetts’ own textiles are grounded in ideas of change. The fabrics included in the exhibition are sourced from different Scottish mills and selected from “remnants that [these] mills struggle to get rid of because they’re inconsistent,” the designer explains. Bennett has previously worked with Reweave, a fashion initiative that analyses waste streams and explores how mill waste can be designed into woven textiles, “and I earmarked that as something to experiment with in future,” she adds. A series of the textile wall hangings, for instance, are created using cloth that has not yet been washed, felted and stabilised, “which is referred to in industry as being ‘greasy’,” Bennetts adds, “which means that it’s very raw.” When this fabric is stitched into other fabrics and dyed, “it felts within that process, so something quite stringy becomes quite ‘sheepy’, almost like felted line work.” Although this process can be controlled to a degree, Bennetts notes, “it’s still quite unpredictable. Many of these pieces celebrate happy accidents.”

Within this spirit of serendipity is a form of access to Bennetts’ own practice, which celebrates critically working with fabrics in a manner dictated by the realities of production systems, while also seeking to create new textile futures through this action: her practice is dedicated to "using what is already in circulation,” and the potential to “transform material through process rather than sourcing new.” In this respect, “Hinterlands” refers not only to the geographical area of Edinburgh’s north, but also the manner in which Bennetts’ own design nudges at the edges of textile production as it stands today. “It was Alice, the curator, who she sent me an email saying that it would be good to expose the hinterlands of my process as part of the show,” she says, “and showing that unseen edge of things.” Further crossovers arise between practice and geography in the way in which water serves as a transformational force in the textiles on display – a nod to the coastal region in which Smith lived her life. “A lot of the material used throughout the exhibition is one type of cotton organdie,” Bennetts explains, “which has been either dyed very dark black, or with a pinky hue that comes from having been dyed in tea.” Immersion in water has shaped the textiles in numerous ways. When the organdie is first washed, for instance, it crinkles up in the water, while elsewhere silk organza has taken on the dye differently to the cotton organdie when soaked, creating new tones from the same palette. “It is nice that pretty much all of these textiles have been through some kind of water process, be it washing, felting or dying, which seems quite in keeping for a coastal story,” Bennetts adds.

This is the nature of Hinterlands, an exhibition that blends different stories together in works that speak of transformation and the memories that can be threaded through a material. "Alice was very generous, and right from the offset said to run with this story of my grandmother as a story for my own work and development, but not to feel obliged to actually have to share it at the end,” Bennetts says. “We could have kept it discreet, but actually, I find it quite celebratory. Nessie was 95 when she passed away, she had a long life, and I think it's an interesting way to talk to people about these places that we all experience in different ways, and this idea of change.” In Bennetts’ work, this idea of transformation is paramount. Places and materials adapt and shift, but their histories and provenance are seeded throughout their present realities – the hinterlands are never far from the surface.

Words Oli Stratford
Photographs Murray Orr

Hinterlands is on display at Mote102 until 27 September 2025.

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