Billie Zangewa is a textile artist producing fiber art (fine art produced with fabrics) that reveals a story. Her scenes are elaborate and detailed, telling both her own life and that of others – looking at what it means to be a black woman in today’s world, exploring themes of gender, skin-tone, and identity. Her contemporary art both recording and investigating the experiences of everyday life for women, often through portraying a working diary of her own.
In My Solitude, 2018, Hand-stitched Silk Collage. Billie Zangewa.
Image is courtesy of Lehmann Maupin
Zangewa’s art selects from a variety of different textiles, all of them rich in quality and colour, from the silks she often uses, to the golden sequins that highlight a passage of time in the artist’s life, or to emphasise a name such as Paris or ‘the Ritz’ and with it the perspective of glitz that the name implies. One of the themes Zangewa’s art so beautifully seeks, is the definition of what being a mum means in an urbanised and modern world, where women can be both feminine and strong. To being creators of a homelife whilst also having an independence of careers, ambitions and self-identity, the two don’t have to be in conflict but in partnership.
Self-portraiture doesn’t seem quite the right word to express what Zangewa’s work is, it feels more than this; that as viewers we are invited to see her world, her dreams, and the regular activities that form part of her life, that form ours, and in creating this tangible world, it feels we become closer to the art portrayed. In any other medium I feel this would be lost, the projection to the viewers changed, for Zangewa’s work is highly emotive, the pieces singing with their feelings, and drawing us to pull from memories of our own. In creating the art Billy Zangewa has poured herself into it and not just in the scenes depicted.
