“I’ve always lived with that conversation about clothes […] For me, clothes were always speaking in one way or another.”
—Lubaina HimidFrom her origins as a major contributor to the United Kingdom’s Black Art movement in the 1980s, Lubaina Himid has continued to produce bold and witty work that explores the lived experience of the African Diaspora through a familiar visual language. In the present example, Himid recalls her Zanzibarian heritage and her mother’s own textile practice by taking inspiration from kangas, patterned cloth wraps that are intended for everyday wear and often feature a humorous message. As Hettie Judah has suggested, in these works Himid reflects on the ways in which clothing and textiles speak directly to us and are, in fact, ‘busy communicating all the time: their meaning altered by how, where and by whom they were being worn.’ Translating the visual display of the worn garments to the flattened surface of the paper ground here, Himid employs the typical format of kangas, including the patterned border, central field of colour, and strip of text.
A recipient of the Turner Prize in 2017 as well as a CBE in 2018 ‘for services to Black Women’s Art’, Himid has maintained a revered position at the forefront of contemporary British art, as evidenced in her critically acclaimed retrospective, which opened at Tate Modern in 2021. As previously marginalised voices are retrospectively included into established canons of Western art, works such as Himid’s are integral in developing a more varied and pluralistic history of visual culture from a range of perspectives. A central thread running through Himid’s practice, these works formed the basis of The Freedom Kangas, her 2017 artist’s book commissioned by the Freedom Festival in Hull. Drawing together the complex histories and geographic specificity of the international slave trade, abolition, and the textile industries based in the north of England, The Freedom Kangas and The Derivation Is An Illusion (Kanga) amplify the voices woven through these fabrics.
