Lost Threads, Lubaina Himid (2021, 2023) (EMPIRE LINES x Holburne Museum, British Textile Biennale)

Artist and curator Lubaina Himid unravels entangled histories of transatlantic slavery and textile production, across continents, and Britain’s museum collections, via Lost Threads (2021, 2023).

Lubaina Himid considers herself ‘fundamentally a painter’, but textiles have long been part of her life and practice. Had she stayed in Zanzibar, the country of her birth in East Africa, she may have become a kanga designer, following a pattern set by her mother’s interest in fashion, and childhood spent around department stores in London. First commissioned by the British Textile Biennial in 2021, and installed in Gawthorpe Hall’s Great Barn, her 400m-long work Lost Threads’ flows in a manner reflective of the movement of the oceans, seas, and waterways which historically carried raw cotton, spun yarn, and woven textiles between continents, as well as enslaved people from Africa to pick raw cotton in the southern states of America, and workers who migrated from South Asia to operate looms in East Lancashire. Now on display in Bath, the rich Dutch wax fabrics resonate with the portraits on display in the Holburne Museum’s collection of 17th and 18th century paintings - symbols of how much of the wealth and prosperity of south-west England has been derived from plantations in the West Indies.

Lubaina talks about how the meaning of her work changes as it travels to different contexts, with works interpreted with respect to Indian Ocean histories in the port city of Sharjah, to accessible, participatory works in Cardiff, and across Wales. We consider her ‘creative interventions’ in object museums and historic collections, ‘obliterating the beauty’ of domestic items like ceramics, and her work with risk-taking curators in ‘regional’ and ‘non-conventional’ exhibition spaces. We discuss her formative work within the Blk Art group in the 1980s, collaboration with other women, and being the first Black artist to win the Turner Prize in 2017. And drawing on her interests in theatre, Lubaina hints at other collections and seemingly ‘resolved’ histories that she’d like to unsettle next.

Lubaina Himid: Lost Threads runs at the Holburne Museum in Bath until 21 April 2024.

For more about Dutch wax fabric and ‘African’ textiles, hear the British Museum's Dr. Chris Spring on Thabo, Thabiso and Blackx, Araminta de Clermont (2010).

For more about Claudette Johnson, hear curator Dorothy Price on And I Have My Own Business in This Skin (1982) at the Courtauld Gallery in London.

Hear artist Ingrid Pollard on Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) at the Turner Contemporary in Margate.

Hear curator Griselda Pollock from Medium and Memory (2023) at HackelBury Fine Art in London.

And for more about the wealth of colonial, Caribbean sugar plantations which founded the Holburne Museum, hear Dr. Lou Roper on ⁠Philip Lea and John Seller’s A New Map of the Island of Barbados (1686)⁠, an object in its collection.

Recommended reading:

On Lubaina Himid: gowithyamo.com/blog/the-revolutionary-act-of-walking-in-the-city

On Maud Sulter: gowithyamo.com/blog/reclaiming-visual-culture-black-venus-at-somerset-house

On Sonia Boyce: gowithyamo.com/blog/feeling-her-way-sonia-boyces-noisy-exhibition

On Life Between Islands at Tate Britain: artmag.co.uk/the-caribbean-condensed-life-between-islands-at-the-tate-britain

WITH: Lubaina Himid, British artist and curator, and professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire. Himid was one of the first artists involved in the UK's Black Art movement in the 1980s, and appointed MBE and later CBE for services to Black Women's/Art. She won the Turner Prize in 2017, and continues to produce work globally.

ART: ‘Lost Threads, Lubaina Himid (2021, 2023)’.

SOUNDS: Super Slow Way, British Textile Biennial (2021).

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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