Space Walk, 2002 (detail). Fiberglass (England), silkscreen print on cotton sateen and cotton brocade (USA), and plastic (England). Dimensions vary with installation. Edition of 2.

Space Walk, 2002. Fiberglass (England), silkscreen print on cotton sateen and cotton brocade (USA), and plastic (England). Dimensions vary with installation. Edition of 2.

Yinka Shonibare

While not new to fabric as an artistic medium, Yinka Shonibare had the freedom during his residency at the FWM to create custom print designs for the textiles that would clothe figures in a new installation. Titled Space Walk, the installation ventures into the new frontier of American exploration—space. A man and woman—dressed in brightlycolored space suits, and wearing backpacks and helmets—float near a half-scale fiberglass and wood copy of the Apollo 13 shuttle. Pioneers of space, the couple refashions concepts of expansion, exploration, and potential colonization.

Shonibare designed four new fabrics for Space Walk. Based on the Dutch waxprinted batiks he has often used in previous work, the new designs recreate a batik patterning not through the traditional wax method, but through silkscreen printing. Two batik designs were created—one based on a traditional batik drip patterning, the other on a grid—and they were used as background for the printed textiles. The handmade quality of the prints was emphasized by printing the repeat pattern off-register; in other words, with each printing of the design, the silkscreen was allowed to move so the patterns do not align perfectly. The dominant motifs—drawn from the late 1960s and early 1970s music tradition produced in Philadelphia, known as the “Philly Sound”—are layered on the batik background. The artist borrowed images, text, and photographs from record albums of such period bands as The Intruders, Three Degrees, The O’Jays, and Contemporary singer Jill Scott. Shonibare made a master drawing, which was then transferred to silkscreens for printing. Characteristic of Shonibare’s work, the colors of the textiles are vibrant oranges, turquoises, and reds, another reference to the Dutch wax fabrics on which the designs are based.

Bio

British, born 1962, lives in London
Yinka Shonibare was born in London and grew up in Nigeria, where his family moved when he was four years old. He returned to London at the age of 17 to study at Goldsmith’s College, University of London. Shonibare’s interest in the longlasting and pervasive effects of colonialization is evinced in the sculptural tableaux for which he has become known. Nuclear Family, for example, is an arrangement of headless figures clothed in finely detailed Victorian fashions, made not from historically-accurate fabrics, but from African kinte cloth. The kinte cloth, too, is not what it seems; through the complex web of colonial-era trade, the wax-printed fabric was actually manufactured in Holland and only later shipped to West Africa, where it was adopted and has now become synonymous with traditional African textiles. Shonibare’s work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2002, and other one-person shows include those organized by the Tate Britain in London (2001), The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (2001), the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (2000), and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (1997).