Beth Derbyshire is presenting two newly commissioned artworks as part of the Smethwick Imaginarium features a guided art trail of newly commissioned artworks by the Canal and River Trust and funded by Arts Council England. The trail runs from September 19th - 0ctober 21 2026. What Lies Beneath Us is a collaborative artwork by Beth Derbyshire comprising of 225 extra-large bunting flags installed along the canal towpath. Developed through poetry, conversation and collage workshops at Smethwick Library, the work brings together residents' reflections on belonging, journeys and neighbourhood.

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Viewed alongside Message (2005), What Lies Beneath Us can be understood as a return to questions that have occupied Beth Derbyshire for more than two decades: how people communicate across difference, how individual voices enter public space, and how collective stories are formed.

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In Message, Derbyshire used military semaphore to broadcast the phrase, "War turns us to stone. In remembrance we shine and rise to new days" live along the River Thames. Twenty-one years later, communication remains central to her practice, but the focus has shifted from transmission to participation. Rather than a single message, What Lies Beneath Us emerges from workshops, conversations and encounters with the residents of Smethwick.

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Read through the lens of Message (2005), What Lies Beneath Us represents a twenty-one-year return to the proposition that communication is fundamental to community life and to the stories nations tell about themselves. The work suggests that belonging is not fixed or inherited but continually produced through dialogue, participation and care.

The themes explored in What Lies Beneath Us also chime with the wider National Conversation, launched in May 2026 by the Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion. Designed as a UK-wide listening exercise focused on belonging, trust and community life, the initiative reflects many of the same questions at the heart of Derbyshire's project: Who is heard, what connects us, and how communities are made through dialogue and participation.

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The project presents community as something actively created through exchange and listening. Phrases such as "Neighbours listening" and "Connected through common ground" suggest that belonging is built through everyday acts of communication rather than inherited through geography or nationality. A recurring question within the work, "Who gets heard?" acknowledges contemporary debates around visibility, representation and participation while refusing a singular answer. In an age shaped by social media, political polarisation and competing claims to visibility, the question feels particularly pressing.

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Collective authorship lies at the heart of the installation. Drawing together many voices and experiences, the text operates as a democratic archive rather than a fixed narrative. The poem repeatedly returns to the metaphor of weaving and connection, suggesting that individual stories form part of a larger social fabric. Community becomes not a stable identity but an ongoing process of relationship-building.

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The installation's visual form reinforces this idea. Hundreds of colourful bunting pennants carry fragments of text generated through community participation. At a time when public displays of flags have become increasingly contested symbols within debates about migration, identity and belonging, Derbyshire reimagines the flag as a vehicle for memory, conversation and shared experience. She transforms a form often associated with national identity into a collective civic narrative rooted in neighbourhood, diverse ancestries, and the everyday processes through which people come to live together and feel that they belong.

 

The flags offer an alternative reading of what a flag might be. Rather than marking territory or declaring allegiance, they carry stories, memories and voices. In this sense, the installation asks:

What if the flag did not represent who belongs here, but instead carried the stories of everyone already here?

Alongside What Lies Beneath Us, Derbyshire presents Revelations, a sculptural installation comprising limestone casts taken from the interiors of suitcases. If the flags give voice to collective experience, the suitcases evoke more personal histories of relocation and memory. By casting their interiors, Derbyshire creates monuments to absence and to the histories people carry with them. Together, the works explore both public and private forms of belonging.

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Within the context of a contemporary cultural flashpoint surrounding the Bayeux Tapestry, a connection runs quietly through the project. Both combine text, imagery and movement to tell a larger story. Both combine text, imagery and movement to tell a larger story. Yet where the Bayeux Tapestry records conquest and political transformation, What Lies Beneath Us chronicles the making of a neighbourhood through conversation, collective authorship and everyday encounter. If the Bayeux Tapestry tells the story of a kingdom, Derbyshire's work tells the story of a community and how it is made.

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As the text reminds us:

"Threads of connection, we are collected, a spectrum."

 

Community becomes the thread, and communication the metaphorical stitchwork that binds it together. Like the Bayeux Tapestry, the work unfolds across a landscape and accumulates many voices into a larger narrative. Unlike the medieval embroidery, however, its history is not written by rulers or victors. It emerges from the lives, memories and encounters of ordinary people, creating what might be understood as a contemporary people's tapestry.