Zulfiya Spowart

Beshik (The Cradle), 2026

Spowart's installation expands on an earlier work that centres the beshik – a Central Asian cradle considered the "first home" of a newborn. The cradle rocks, and its repetitive motion puts the child to sleep, sending the body into a state of weightlessness. But beneath the tenderness of the work is an inherent fragility: an exposure to disruptions that upsets the cradle's soothing rhythms.

The predictable back-and-forth, once off-kilter, feels to the body like falling. This sensation mirrors the body's reactions to the loss of the Aral – a heart-dropping vertigo that uproots and disorients.

The daily rhythms that centred life by the water, now offbeat, must be syncopated and adapt to the young desert. Zulfiya Spowart's explorations of the mother and child relationship, through the warmth and tactility of fabric and wood, frame the reciprocal impact between us and nature through intimacy, heartbreak, and mending. Herself a mother to three daughters, the act of caring for them became integral to her creative process: her forms and techniques arise from what she could physically carve, sew or weave while looking after her children.