Tag: blackfemaleondon

Upon Linen We Gather – Lulama Wolf

The African vernacular experience is a tapestry of language and its dialects, familial cultural norms and their tribal nuances, the pursuit of greatness anchored in the gravitas of communal duty. It is on this tapestry of intersectional culture, in a west London gallery that my social axis is tilted.

SoShiro Gallery – Marylebone, London

The door is opened by a tall, beautiful woman, with a dreadlocked ponytail, who welcomes us with homely ease. The gallery, at first sight, looks like its former life, a Georgian Marylebone white terraced home. This style of display is a far echo from the white-walled gallery norm. Instead, the works hang against floor-to-ceiling geometric walls. The featured pieces of contemporary furniture give the art a familial and intimate poise, making the majestic attainable, liveable.

I later learn that the woman is Shiro Muchiro, Kenyan born interior architect and founder of SoShiro Gallery. Her work centers on mixed media collaborations and expanding our experience beyond museums into lived spaces.

Nomaza Nongqunga Coupez – SoShiro Gallery

We turn into what would’ve been the living room and in it stands an icon in the South African art industry, Nomaza Nongqunga Coupez, draped in copper-orange velvet. The France-based entrepreneur and founder of Undiscovered Canvas, with a focus on “promoting investment in African arts”, greets us wholeheartedly. The girl had a split second to decide who I’d be in this narrative, but fangirl and hype-woman be my original nature! I Marylebonically, black-girl-in-an-art-gallery, lost my mind. She gracefully talks us through some of the pieces she’s curated for this exhibition. Her pride is that of a midwife, holding a new born in the air.

Luluma Wolf during her residency with Undiscovered Canvas – Antibes, France

The African perspective is a common caricature in western culture. We are not often set up as intelligent, fully formed, positive contributors to our own narrative and to the world’s at large. But here I am, in a house exclusively dedicated to showcasing Luluma Wolf’s phenomenal work. Her art embodies a strong African vernacular language with a contemporary tone. She peels at the layers surrounding pre-colonial dignity and spirituality. In this collection of Ndizalwe Nge Ngubo Emhlophe (I was born wrapped in a white blanket), she works through the mediums of acrylic paint mixed with Mediterranean sand, carefully stroked onto linen canvas. It is upon her linen canvases that we gather and marvel. The work is gritty yet gentle. The prominent eye is a call, a cry, a conversation, a prayer.

Nomaza and Luluma – Antibes, France

The evening ends with communion and warm drinks. At this point, we have also met Mae, Maya, and Elle of Zambian descent. Nomaza is generous with her time and heart. We all share a full spread of hope and the lessons of lived moments. We loan each other courage; we barter in beauty and purpose. I remember my WHY and breathe in this answered prayer.

I STAN every single woman I met on this day: their generosity of spirit, their intelligence, and the important work they do for black women. You don’t know you are writing an International Women’s Month piece until you are writing one.

[There were guys too, like my friend David who shared it all with me 🙂 ]

Growing Roots

In the Quiet

I am flailing, mid-air, mid-worlds. I have cut myself from the ground, from home. I am desperate for warm soil, familiarity, but the flailing takes to flying and I can’t explain how I am happy here. I am waiting for the African hair store to open when a breeze gathers around me – London feels like some where I’ve been before, it fits like a Cinderella shoe the morning after. But how does one anchor themselves to a place without a deep love – without years of fermented friendship and unwavering family. Can roots grow on furniture?  

My favourite memories are of my childhood years spent in Protea and Chiawelo – Soweto. They mostly feature a band of dusty kids pretending in a 10-brick ‘house’ or taking turns rolling down a hill in empty oil drums. We were an eclectic mix of languages and parental history; the pollen of bantu stands germinating on township concrete. As an adult, I am often dazed by how children create language where an impossible chasm should otherwise loom. How they meet on opposite sides of a river and jump into a downstream joy, buoyant in the ease of innocence. We were curious things cooking stolen tomatoes and maize meal in dirty tin cans axigangeni. Most of us didn’t belong, those who did had nowhere else to go. Every so often a kid, who’d been abandoned for a new city lover or weaned prematurely for the sake of a kitchen job, would finally come to live with his birth mother; jostled out of his grandmother’s fertile rural soil, crying, roots flailing. He would have not chosen this form of despair, this severing. Soon enough though, he too would join the bustling metropolis, swiftly trading in broken glass diamonds and cigarette foil gold.

The store is late to open today. Nostalgia swirls around me. In some parallel version of the universe, I am experiencing London through Soweto’s lens – a metropolis of misfits. Most of us don’t belong and those who do, have nowhere else to go.

I am a child in adult costume. I’ve come all the way across the world to find a memory. I have chosen freedom, the kind that cuts you right out the ground. Only, roots don’t grow on furniture or on the material possessions we think will make a foreign place feel like home. They grow in faith. In the faith that you are where you need to be, that all is as it should be.  

Where are you? How did you come to it?