Textile Art

The Post-colonial Gaze on African Womanhood. Batik Textile Art and My conversations with: The African LookBook by Catherine McKinley.

My current project reflects what I describe as my conversations with Catherine McKinley’s book: The African LookBook.  Briefly stated, the African LookBook is a visual history of 100 years of African women. As the jacket cover to the books indicates, previous images of African women particularly as captured by European explorers “were purely anthropological – bright displays of exotica where the deeper person hood seemed tucked away.”

Curator Mckinley’s book with its extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos presents “images [to] tell a different story of African women: how deeply cosmopolitan and modern they are in style; how they were able to reclaim the tools of colonial oppression that threatened their self hood and livelihood.”

I find this description very engaging and will assist in my own work in exploring the notion of African Womanhood, a central theme and focus of my art. For this project, I will focus on her chapter, “Clothes for a new Nation.”

This chapter focusing on the everyday lives and dresses of women, shows how the camera became a powerful decolonizing tool. As Curator McKinley narrates: African women appearing in various “uniforms” of statehood were engaged in new identity formations. She writes further that: “The new fashions were dramatic proofs of a conscious engagement with pan-African and other radical ideas in politics across the continent …”

With this project, my aim is to use my expertise in batik, textile creations and painting to tell aspects of this story.