Lubaina Himid: Lost Threads
The Holbourne Museum in Bath is currently hosting an exhibition by the Turner prize-winner Lubiana Himid. Entitled Lost Threads and comprising some 400 metres of Dutch wax fabric, the vibrant fabric has been wound around the pillars on the front of the museum and laid out in two of the rooms inside. Lubiana Himid wants the installation to tell an alternative history of the people whose portraits hang on the walls of the museum.
The Museum houses a number of portraits of people whose wealth was connected to the cotton trade and to slavery; plantation owners and others with connections to the East India Company and the Royal Africa Company. Indeed it was the wealth generated by this trade that funded the development of the fashionable city of Bath during the 18th century and beyond.
The reams of cloth, now made for African women to make dresses for special occasions, are arranged so as to reflect the movement of oceans and rivers, the routes that were used to transport cotton, yarn and enslaved people.