Interview | How Lubaina Himid's Lost Threads confronts Bath's colonial past

Katie Tobin

How Lubaina Himid’s Lost Threads confronts Bath’s colonial past

Lost Threads at The Holburne Museum, 19 January – 21 April 2024.
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Firstly, I’d just like to chat with you a little bit about how the inspiration for Lost Threads came about.
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Lost Threads was commissioned in the very first place by the British Textile Biennial up in East Lancashire. They wanted me to respond to a textile collection at Gawthorpe Hall, but I didn’t want to – at that particular time – do it in the museum. So there was this barn on the grounds of Gawthorpe Hall – a big, beautiful wooden barn – and I wanted to say, outside of the textile collection, when you’re talking about the history of textiles in the region, you’re kind of not talking about the whole connection between the colonies, colonialism, the slave trade and the cotton industry in Britain.
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With all the pieces I make, it’s about a conversation between what’s there and what isn’t there. And so I, with my studio team, sewed together these 400 metres of fabric bought in shops in London. Usually it’s fabric bought in, made by African women and women from the African diaspora, for making dresses for weddings, for special occasions. And in a way, it mirrors, not so much a transatlantic trade, but a kind of trade between Europe, the Dutch colonies, and West Africa.
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So then when I brought it here two years later, I wanted to use it to weave its way in and out of the building. To say, okay, here we have this long building, but it’s a hotel, treated like a sort of stately home with a big aristocrat’s collection in it, but in the city to die for. But you can’t make cities like that and have places like this, and privilege and collections like this without somebody suffering. So I want to say, don’t forget that this is how it is because of what happened to these people.
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Moving on to the fabric itself, how do fabric and found objects influence? How do you feel they engage with these historical spaces?
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Because, very often, these spaces have fabulous collections of ceramics or they have paintings where everyone is dressed in the most splendid fabric. You know that audiences come because they like those kinds of objects. They know about them, they bring their own kind of histories of what they know about clothes, what they know about ceramics or jewellery or silverware.
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I just want to say I love that stuff too. It’s like going to big department stores when I was a child, perambulating through these spaces looking at wonderful things. But it’s important to know where the gaps are. I see my work as there to fill in the gap that isn’t in the history of the house, that isn’t in the history of the objects in a very obvious way, but it does actually thread its way through that.
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I’m hoping when these go, as they’re in here temporarily, there will be a vibration or a trace of them, or a dim memory of them that can linger. Quite often that’s what I’m after too. You see these contemporary interventions in a museum space and then when you go back to a museum space they’re not there anymore. But something about them, something of them physically remains in that way.

I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about how you see Lost Threads engaging and challenging those kinds of traditional museum spaces and narratives.
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Museums are really, really trying incredibly hard now to be more inclusive. To widen, broaden, and deepen their audiences. Of course, it’s important that those audiences that have always come continue to come because audiences are important to museums. If there isn’t an audience, there isn’t an ongoing conversation.
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But I think it is important for the curators and the holders of those collections to understand that, if you’re going to keep history relevant, then you have to keep digging. You have to keep digging into how the museum became the museum it became, where those objects came from, how they were commissioned and who owns them in order to get young people, who need to have an exciting experience, to engage. So museums need to have these odd, sometimes dysfunctional, juxtapositions to address the politics, to bring in other audiences.
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And, at the same time, you have to show some respect to the audiences that have supported the place anyway. Even if they are older or more privileged, they are curious, interested people and if you give them a good enough intervention – a good enough story – then they will really engage. They’re keen to know more.
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More broadly, what role do you see art playing in terms of reclaiming and preserving these lost threads of history? Do you think they have the power to rewrite older narratives and challenge conventional ideas?
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I do think it can. Of course, you have to believe in contemporary art and that it can do that. But I think that contemporary art has that way of disrupting. Even if you put something not as contentious as talking about captured Africans or trading people, if you put something that was more gentile but contemporary into a museum, then it still upsets the balance.
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In their day, I think that a lot of these great pieces of ceramics and paintings were disrupting something. To imagine that they were always gentile is wrong. Sometimes they’re depicting people that were involved in some scandal or were trading slaves. Everything, in a way, that’s in these museums had a kind of contested history. When you put it into a museum it looks all neat and resolved but it wasn’t at the time.
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As a final question, I’m curious to know about how your Turner Prize win and the recognition you’ve received have changed your artistic practice. Has it helped catalyse certain aspects of what you’d like to say through your work?
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I think more people want to know what I want to say, that’s true. And I’m probably making more shows for more places but there are still museums and galleries that want to show older work from the 1980s. But I like to make new projects and although I was steadily doing that for museums, I wasn’t working in galleries in the same way. So it’s really quite different.
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Lubaina Himid CBE RA is a British artist and curator. She is a professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire. Her art focuses on themes of cultural history and reclaiming identities.

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