'It is possible to change something about yourself, or about your surroundings, or about the world.'
Lubaina Himid

I recently attended a retrospective of the artist Lubaina Himid. (Tate Modern, London until 3 July.)

Himid’s work encompasses embroidered banners, walk-through experiences, soundscapes and stage tableaux. There are vibrant pictures of abstract patterns, imagined buildings and intriguing people; coloured wooden wagons painted with beetles, spiders and jellyfish, an exploration of the emotional resonances of the colour blue and an installation of overturned jelly moulds. Her art denies all boundaries and invites our participation. It explores the imprint of the past on our lives and the opportunity to reclaim our identities and embrace change. 

‘The beginning of my life was a terrible tragedy.’

Himid was born in Zanzibar in 1954. Her father died of malaria when she was just four months old and she moved to London with her textile designer mother. In the mid 1970s she took a course in Theatre Design at the Wimbledon College of Art.

‘[The theatre] seemed like it was somewhere you can make things happen, where things change, costumes change, sets change, locations change, emotions change.’

Himid went on to study Cultural History at the Royal College of Art, and through the 1980s she organized several exhibitions within the UK's Black Art movement.

‘I absolutely knew from an early age that African people, Black people, made art, but everywhere around was telling me that we didn’t.’

A darkness looms over much of Himid’s work – shadows of colonialism, echoes of historic injustice. ‘A Fashionable Marriage’ reveals a contemporary world beset by the ghosts of racism. The ‘Le Rodeur’ series takes its name from a notorious French slaving ship. ‘Men in Drawers’ features portraits hidden inside furniture - ‘memories of people whose names no one had bothered to write down.’ Sometimes her art considers migration: exile and escape, safety and danger. The sea seems ever-present, at once serene and sinister.

‘The past, the present and the future overlap and speak together or are in the room at the same time.’

Despite these melancholy themes, Himid’s work does not present us with victims or demand our pity. Rather it is vibrant and colourful, haunting and enigmatic. 

Elegant young men in sharp fashions meet and chat and do business. Small, subtle gestures catch the eye - ‘private moments in public places.’ 

‘I’m much more interested in how people are; people, that is, who don’t often get painted. The men who have market stalls, or the men playing dominoes, or the man who has just cooked while the others are eating. There’s drama in the everyday, in the small-seeming moments.’

Himid often paints women talking in purposeful groups, developing strategies, planning, negotiating, making decisions: ‘working out our complicated futures together.’

She seems to be suggesting that, though our lives are haunted by the past, we all have agency: the power to reclaim our identity, to rewrite our destiny.

And so, when she presents us with bold depictions of cogs, nails and tools accompanied by the language of instruction manuals, she could be urging us to take matters into our own hands, to get up and get to work on tomorrow.

‘Provide adequate protection.’ 

‘Allow for short breaks.’

‘Work from underneath.’ 

‘Ensure sufficient space.’

This theme of exhortation is taken up at various points in the exhibition when the artist asks us some pointed questions:

‘We live in clothes, we live in buildings. Do they fit us?’

‘What are monuments for?’

‘How much power can I have and what will I do with it?’

‘Where shall we go together?’

Since the age of 36 Himid has lived in Preston. She is a professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire, and, appropriately, her studio is located above the Citizens Advice Bureau in the city centre. 

Himid’s art is involving, provocative, inspiring. It encourages us to re-evaluate our own situation, to recalibrate what is possible. We may feel frustrated with the cards that life and career have dealt us. In her own quiet voice Himid reminds us that we can still learn. And we can change.

‘The work is not meant to comfort you or me, but it might sometimes remind us about what we already know, what might be useful to have remembered about the last crisis in order to avoid too much devastation in the midst of the next.’

'It's been too hard living,
But I'm afraid to die.
'Cause I don't know what's up there
Beyond the sky.
It's been a long,
A long time coming.
But I know a change gonna come,
Oh, yes it will.’

Sam Cooke, 'A Change Is Gonna Come'

No. 356