Lubaina Himid: A Fine Toothed Comb – Interview part one

Marjorie H Morgan

Lubaina Himid CBE RA is a British Turner Prize-winning artist who was born in Zanzibar, Tanzania and moved to the UK at four months old. Himid initially studied and worked in theatre and interior design in the 1970s, and thereafter - from the early 1980s - she has concentrated on creating, curating, and teaching art, becoming a pivotal figure in the Black British arts movement.

Himid’s work has been shown widely in national and international spaces, and her solo exhibition at Tate Modern (November 2021 - July 2022) was the first by a Black woman artist in that gallery space. For Manchester-based HOME, Himid has curated A Fine Toothed Comb, an exhibition which addresses hidden and forgotten layers within the city of Manchester, and runs from 07 October 2023 - 07 January 2024. This exhibition features new commissions of Himid’s own work, alongside commissions from Preston-based artists Magda Stawarska, Rebecca Chesney and Tracy Hill.

Writer Marjorie H Morgan had a conversation with Lubaina Himid – who was at the HOME gallery overseeing the final pre-opening work – to discuss her curation of the four installations in A Fine Toothed Comb exhibition.

Marjorie H. Morgan: the Fourdrinier have a professional development scheme for diverse and underrepresented artists; is what you are doing with this current curation similar in any way?

Lubaina Himid: The three artists that I am working with are white European women. Magda Stawarska originally hails from Poland, she’s been here about 23 years. Tracy Hill and Rebecca Chesney are both English women from the Midlands and the North of England.

In the art world, showing work by women who are professional artists but who live in this region as opposed to coming from London,  New York or somewhere else, is often quite rare in exhibitions that take place in Manchester in those bigger publicly funded institutions. I suppose what you would call the diverse bit of this is that finally, HOME, have had the courage, because of the curator Clarissa Corfe, to ask a Black woman to do a project here. I’ve never shown here, even though I’ve lived here for nearly 30 years.

I was able to say, what I’d actually like to do is something about Manchester, and I want to do it with women who are artists who work with me, and in the same studios as me, and the same print rooms as me in Preston in Lancashire. I am trying to test a quite particular system because in recent years, once I became more well known and more sought after, big institutions wanted me to find them the next wave of young Black women artists.

That’s what I did way back in the 80s with Sonya Boyce, Veronica Ryan, Claudette Johnson, Marlene Smith, Sutapa Biswas, Chila Kumari Burman, all those were artists who were working away, and I ‘found them’.

I didn’t find them like you find someone who is lost, I found them together. And because I did that, and those people like me now have big shows, win the Turner Prize, The Golden Lion at Venice, and are successful in that European art model, I think that these institutions are looking to me to do that again.

I still like to support those starting off, emerging artists, but I do it behind the scenes now. I want those artists to be confident, to be ready, to know some of the pitfalls of being cornered in a particular way, to have conversations with them about how they might want to present themselves, not reacting to how they are presented. I know for a long time people like Sadé Mica or Amber Akaunu, so the criteria for me is early, emerging artists, but I don’t like to be just relied on to find these people.

I think institutions, curators need to be doing their own looking and asking people who are also much younger than me about who else they know. I don’t want to be this Grand Oracle.

MHM: I think the mantle suits you, but I understand why you wouldn’t want it.

LH: I’ve been working for the past 40 years, but these regional artists have been supporting me the past ten or fifteen years. Many of the artists that I know very well, don’t live in the regions any more, they all left when they were 20 and went to London, and that’s where I met them. Or at art schools in the Midlands or in the North and I was doing one or two days teaching. I found, or came across, and had conversations with those women then.

Because these women who have supported me work in this region, like many hundreds of artists, their work is not taken quite as seriously as it might be, so I wanted to show their work in a really good venue.

MHM: I understand that all four of the artists, including yourself, are based in Preston where there may be a sheen of invisibility over women artists from the North, is what you are doing with your curation with Clarissa Corfe, and the installation of the four artists in A Fine Toothed Comb uncovering what you consider was invisible before in the regions?

LH: Yes, and the shows I make are often about the audiences that come to them. I know that if you put on a show in Manchester, most of the people who come are from Manchester, and all of those people are from different backgrounds, of different ages, with their different experience of engaging with art and art centres, bringing a whole lot of information and knowledge about living in the city to the exhibition. I wanted to set up something that served as a conversation about the city, about its history, its geology, about its wealth and poverty, and about where and how you position yourself as a member of the huge community of Manchester, and what you do with that.

This exhibition is a sort of talking shop.

We know that people will bring an immense amount of knowledge, what we wanted to each differently make the work about things that are not often spoken about.

You know that the more buildings you build in Manchester, the less birdsong you’re going to hear. It’s obvious, you build a building, the birds have got nowhere to live. That means that all sorts of other things are not there. Where there could have been a park, there’s a building, where there could have been bugs and insects, and birds and other kinds of life, and open air, there’s a building. So, it’s that balancing the wealth and regeneration of the city versus the health and wellbeing of the people in it. That’s the concern of Rebecca Chesney.

MHM: Rebecca Chesney’s installation uses textiles and repurposed images from The Popular Handbook of Birds, along with the mixed soundtrack of the early morning chorus of birds with the dawn awakening sounds of Manchester city traffic. Can you explain how these elements work together in the installation space?

LH: Across one huge wall, she has in frames, little paintings from a book about British birds. There are 120 pages of this book, published in about 1950, and since that time, many, many of these birds are now on the amber and red warning list. With each of these, she’s gone through the whole set and she’s painted out the birds that you’re very soon not going to see.

As you see the installation, we’ve hung it in a way that you often kind of see a flock of birds flying across the wall, but then when you get closer you can see that some of these birds are grey, because they’ve been painted out, and some of these birds are in their lovely plumage, so you would still see a Blue Tit, but you maybe don’t see a Nuthatch. You’ll see that there were Nuthatches but you can’t find them in Manchester anymore, or certainly in the next 10 years they’ll be gone. And then the soundtrack is the dawn chorus of the birds that she’s managed to capture outside the building of HOME now. You can hear a snapshot of what was there in September 2023. And if you know about birdsong you would know which birds you can hear, and which birds you can’t hear.

And then she built this sculpture of painted cotton hangings depicting the planning lines and the maps of where and how this area has been built up. In a sense it’s kind of an abstract painting about 9m long and 3.5m high on a triangular wall, that goes around a corner, and that is playing with the wall of birds, and between the two, in a sweet spot in the middle of both these things, you can hear the sound of the dawn chorus.

Tracy Hill went on many walks across Manchester, with a water dowser.

Water dowsers usually work in the countryside, in rural areas, looking for the source of water. There is a magnetic force that happens when water meets rock below ground, and this is off vibrations, and particular people, with a load of training, use not electronic things, but sticks.

MHM: I’ve seen them working, mainly in old films.

LH: This water dowser, who’s worked closely with Tracy for quite a long time, has never water dowsed in a city. Everybody knows that Manchester is full of rivers, canals - it’s a very watery place. So what’s the story? We know it’s got water in it. But what Tracy’s discovered and knew was there, were water sources that were 100m down.

MHM: Hidden, again.

LH: Yes, hidden springs beneath the city. Tracy and this water dowser started off on one of their walks and the water dowser felt the immense force of this hidden spring. Tracy recorded the vibrations, and mapped a course of one of these underground springs, then transferred the vibrations through lithography onto paper – Tracy Hill is a print maker – and then photographed these vibrations, then projected these drawings on to a huge curved wall I built at the far end of the gallery, and Tracy has traced and drawn this drawing right from one corner, on the floor, up through the floor, across the curved wall down to the floor again and out of the window.

You can see the line of the underground spring, but it isn’t a line, it’s like vibrations. So when you walk into the gallery, on the far curved wall you can see these beautiful delicate drawings in charcoal that are these underground springs revealed.

Rebecca’s work is about something that is there and disappearing, and Tracy’s work is about something that is there but that you can’t see.

MHM: Linking the work of those two artists, can you talk a bit about the energies, the soundscape and the examination of rhythms in Magda’s work and how all these installations sit together in the HOME space?

LH: Magda Stawarska, a few years ago, made a beautiful film about the round reading room in Manchester Library. She recorded the sound of the silence that’s supposed to happen in there. What happens of course is when you’re in there you can hear people clearing their throats, crisp packets, everyone is trying to police themselves into silence, but because of the shape of the building with the dome and the circle, every last sniffle echoes and vibrates. So the building is working against it’s very purpose.

Magda recorded these self-policed attempts at silence, and gave this recording to an artist called Heather Mullender- Ross, who listened to the sound and devised a written and then spoken piece which mimics some of those sounds. Then what Magda did for this iteration was to lay that sound track over the most beautiful film of this woman on her own in the library turning the pages of a book. In the book is text by Heather Mullender-Ross about silence: what is silence, how do you find it, what’s it made up of, what happens when you try to find it.

We’ve got this round building in a round space, because the films take place behind that curved wall, so Magda’s work is happening in a dark, round space in the gallery, massive screens, 4m by 3m - two of them have this film of the library with the soundtrack of the sounds of a quiet, silent library, and you’re going round the bookshelves, round the woman turning her pages, round the desk round the tables, round the columns. And then opposite that, on two more screens is a woman rehearsing some cello music in the Music Academy in Łódź, a city in Poland.

This city is often called the ‘Polish Manchester’, because it too has a huge and long history of textiles.

MHM: So, we have two post-industrial cities that have now been reconnected with the silence from Manchester Library, and the reflective interpretation in music from the Music Academy in Łódź. For the visitors to this installation, I’m interested to know about the physical placement of the speakers for this work.

LH: Magda Stawarska, who incidentally always does the sound installation on my pieces, is very keen for the speakers to be at ear level because she sees that as a human listening level; it’s not background, ambient in the supermarket, she’s speaking directly to you as an audience member with this work.

The cellist is rehearsing for herself utterly, but Magda wants you to hear it, so the speakers are ear level, on floor based stands.

MHM: Bearing in mind that each visitor to the exhibition will bring their own personal history, and their local histories of Manchester to the gallery space, all of these works, and we haven’t yet spoken about your own installation in this curation, seem to be very intimate, almost like a one-on-one interaction in a big space.

LH: Absolutely. And before we do get to mine, also in this four-screen sound film installation, these two women are also listening, they’re listening to on a very personal level, you’re absolutely right, to what’s inside their heads as well as listening to being in separate buildings. And in the Music Academy, the camera is going round and round the rehearsing cellist, up and down spiral staircases, around a wonderful circular ceiling, circular inlaid wooden floors. And this Music School was once owned by a hugely successful Jewish textile industrialist. He had to leave Poland before the Nazis came, they took everything, destroyed the synagogues, killed people and ran roughshod over the Polish people that were there. These were German Nazis who invaded the city, destroyed everything but they liked the music, they liked this beautiful Palace, and they turned it into a Music Academy for their children. Then when the war was over and they were finally defeated, the people of Łódź kept it as a Music School because the Posnańskis, the industrialists were dead, were gone.

So within the music school are the ghosts of whole communities that were wiped out by the Nazis. So this cellist is playing this haunting music.

And you know yourself that you go into particular buildings or particular cities or places in the landscape where you know that things have happened before, the vibrations of that somehow are still there. With all three of them there’s a big monumental story that there are plenty of entrances into, but there’s also a personal story that can be accessed by an audience member bringing what they know into each of these installations.

And then at very odd, almost invisible spots within the space, is my work.

All of it is paintings on found objects, and what I’m essentially trying to talk about is thousands of people, of whom I was one many years ago, who was never quite certain whether if I lost my job or I became ill could I stay in my accommodation. It’s been many years since this was anywhere near my situation, but I have known hundreds of people who are in this precarious situation for years on end, and I’m sure you do too.

MHM: Unfortunately, yes. It’s a familiar situation.

LH: The rent has to go up, and your job has to go part time, and your relative is ill and boof! You’re on the street. And this precarious living or surviving, I think, makes people very, very aware of the city in a different way, you find yourself - although it may seem catastrophising to some people - but you find yourself looking for safe spaces.

Where are those big doorways? Where are those potentially slightly warmer or sheltered places or what use could I make of a cart? What use could I make of a door that’s been abandoned? How useful is this drawer that is here? And so I’m presenting in the space potential useful items for managing that precarious situation.

Of course, they’re not, they’re paintings. But everybody can see whether you go to an art gallery or not you do pretty much know what a door is, and you know what a draw is, and you know what a sign is. You know communicating is not very complicated, this is all about the real, and real everyday situations.

I find myself still, even though I’m in this position now, winning all these prizes, and being this successful, I’m still haunted by the sort of two degrees of unravelling that can happen. And I think, of course, cities are like that, when people come from somewhere else, really from far away, they don’t have as much family connection to fall back on when things start to fall apart. Their families are in another city or in another country, or in another almost sort of political universe, so those degrees of separation between having somewhere to lie down at night or somewhere to cook something it turns on a sixpence.

So I have some paintings of people in and on these found objects, they are very contemplative, very calm but they’re very thoughtful and aware and watching and looking, and all the time mildly preoccupied with this state of unbelonging.

This interview is continued in the forthcoming November issue of the Fourdrinier.