Lubaina Himid - Lost Threads

British Textile Biennial

Turner Prize-winning Lubaina Himid presents a major new work presented in the Great Barn at Gawthorpe Hall in Burnley.

Lubaina is particularly interested in the history of textiles in East African and British contexts and how the making of clothing is loaded with the histories of industrialisation, female labour, migration and globalisation.

The installation made from many metres of fabric interwoven through the structure of the barn at Gawthorpe Hall tells the tale of the closely linked trading relationship between Britain, Europe and parts of West and East Africa. The narrative lengths of cotton cloth made up of Dutch Wax Prints, Java Prints and others, show how the histories of what is African and what is not are hidden and disguised even when stretched and flaunted and out on display.

The barn itself will act as a kind of modern Tenter Frame lifting and stretching, holding and dropping the fabric as it mimics the oceans, rivers, brooks and streams woven through these colonial stories.