Creatives Who Reclaim What Caged Them To Be Set Free

A needle, a sewing machine, a nail file, are these ‘feminine’ objects, items to bind and cage us? What about if we turned the things that hold us back into paths of freedom, or symbols of liberation? There is undeniable power in taking what limited you and held you back and reconceptualising it into something that will bring you success. There is ownership in creating a voice in the very things that were suppressed, even looked down upon. Art, with its many forms and space for experimentation, becomes a way of reframing narratives that were concealed. Think of it as manipulating the skin, the cover idea flipping its meaning. Sewing materials that were pushed onto women of prior generations, becoming key props in a sensual dance performance, or long textile cords once used as a mode of record-keeping, now presented as a cascading art installation. Here, what was historically deemed invaluable transforms into beautiful recoveries of suppressed histories. To find out how, read Creatives Who Reclaim What Caged Them To Discover Freedom.

For many communities, objects that may seem trivial or even ancient can represent a larger struggle that one’s ancestors have had to overcome. And when they are reworked and turned into a piece of art, the creative displays a strength that shows not only intergenerational connection, but also resilience. Once objects that defined a story, now flipped, bring a new cover and a new inside.

Makiko Harris Art Homage To Heritage

Makiko Harris is an interdisciplinary artist who draws on her Japanese and American heritage to convey this message, reimagining feminine objects into comically oversized pieces. In her experimental underwater dance film ‘Needle Dance’, Harris explores the ideas of female empowerment and gravity behind human connection. Floating underwater, two dancers become intertwined in a red rope that they thread with oversized needles, the rope becoming one with the skin.

Credit: Carlos Basilico

Oversized objects are a primary interest in her practice, and the motif of needlework is a nod to vivid childhood memories. Harris remembers watching her Japanese grandmother sewing and knitting. The artist always saw this as her way of having a voice in a patriarchal society. After her grandmother’s passing, Harris inherited that same sewing box. From the intimacy of her memories came the idea of creating various types of oversized needles. Their magnitude transforms little pins and needles into weapons. The voice of sewing, then, becomes a potent shield against the erasure of female input and desire that Harris knew her grandmother had to mitigate.

Credit: Ben Pipe Photography

Harris has now been selected as one of the 26 artists chosen for the New Contemporaries cohort. Her latest artwork is ‘Sentinel‘, presenting oversized, powder-coated and brass-plated steel needles, conveying a sense of an invisible thread which links us to our ancestry. This is now presented at the South London Gallery, along with the other 25 artists’ works.

Aurora James, Brother Vellies: How South African Culture Became Global

Aurora James, much like Makiko Harris, took inspiration from her native culture to create a brand that opened up the heritage of the South African shoes, ‘vellies’, to the world. But James’s ambition wasn’t just to spread the word about the comfort of this breathable, soft leather footwear, but also to preserve artisanal jobs and traditional African design practices.

Among the range of materials the brand uses are vegetable-tanned leathers, soles from recycled tyres, hand-carved wood, and dyed feathers. The Brother Vellies collection is produced in South Africa, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Italy, Haiti and at the brand’s base in New York City. Originally, vellies were worn by the Khoisan people, who found them ideal for overcoming difficult climates and rough terrain. After the Dutch settlement, the shoes also became a staple for farmers or explorers, as well as serving as workhorse shoes.

Vellies, which before represented practicality and endurance, have now become a fashion staple, worn by celebrities like David Kramer and Ashton Kutcher. But more than that, they are a time capsule that conveys multi-generational perseverance and the evolution of purpose.

James bridges different textile-makers of the world and brings in sewing practices from a culture that was previously under colonial control. The result is a luxury footwear brand that underscores the rich legacy of South African shoe-making and its flourishing in the contemporary market.

Cecilia Vicuña’s Quipu: Keeping Records, Keeping History

Cecilia Vicuña’s artistic path was not easy. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she found herself in exile a year into being enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, when dictator Augusto Pinochet took over the democratic government of Chile. Nonetheless, the values she was raised in as a child were ones of liberation and artistic expression, which she has carried through her career.

Vicuña’s most famous work is her ‘quipus’, long textile cords with a knot system that were used as a mode of record-keeping amongst the Incas and other Andean cultures. The quipus were key to keeping communities close together; however, the practice was banned during the Spanish colonisation, and only 1000 quipus have survived. For Vicuña, it’s a way of storytelling, of reclaiming the voice that her ancestors were stripped of.

She reimagines those quipus through differing installations. In ‘Precarios’, she situated small found objects in the places of nots, using shells, feathers or bones, turning items into poetic symbols. Or in the very first quipu, ‘mind quipu’, where the cord was empty, conveying all the stories that have been taken away, and asking the viewer to imagine what may have existed in the space. This artwork marked the beginning of the artist’s experimentation with thread and cords, taking a historical practice and seeing how it fits into modern discourses on memory and the sacred.

Annie Frost Nicholson: No, No, Nothing I Can Think Of

At the forefront of Nicholson’s exhibition is grief. Though a short one-syllable word, nobody is safe from grief; it is all around us, no matter how much we wish it wasn’t. The exhibition’s name is the words Nicholson’s father told her on his deathbed when she asked if there was anything he needed to tell her. There wasn’t, but her work is a glimpse into family secrets that are revealed only after someone is deceased.

In 2023, Nicholson discovered that she, in fact, had another sister, whom her father had fathered sixty years before. While her sister had never met him, she shared many of his mannerisms, and Nicholson found similarity in their own features. This encounter seemingly continued the conversation Nicholson never fully had with her father.

‘Ask me no questions i’ll tell you no lies’ – Annie Frost Nicholson

Her paintings are a way of surviving the deaths of your loved ones. For her, they are a discovery of the ‘through’, rather than dividing your own life into the before and after you were left without family. And even beyond that, it also explores collective grief as democracy has been collapsing worldwide since the Second World War.

Nicholson’s work purposefully avoids romanticising the past, thus being painfully aware of the tensions between memory and nostalgia. The painful experiences that she has had inform the way in which she wishes to move forward, and the paintings reflect those childhood memories and where it fits in at the present day.

Ana Laura Aláez: Coexisting With What We Know To Reject

Ana Laura Aláez, newly represented by The Ryder Projects, is an artist who embraces the darker themes, ones that subvert ideals of purity that persistently cage women. Aláez, growing up in 1980s Bilbao, chose to pursue the career of an artist at a time when it was looked down upon, especially for a woman. Her work explores the performative aspects of gender, both through embracing and denouncing it, taking inspiration from the philosopher Julia Kristeva’s ideas around abjection and our repulsion towards bodily fluids, wounds, etc.

Her work is generally seductive and hard to pin down as a single thing, and her newest piece, ‘Snowfall with saliva’, is no exception. Exploring the way the exterior and interior connect, the perfection of the snowflakes is contrasted with the primary bodily substance that is saliva, as it all wraps around the sculpture. Aláez aims to make us realise that the abject exists because we fear the dark corners of our identities, and the sensual beauty of her work suggests that repulsion is only an idea that stems from human preconceptions.

Artists use their craft to redefine challenges, rather than letting the struggle define them. Materials with a supposed surface are transformed beyond their skin. Letting the cage become the springboard for flight. This then becomes a means through which we can take a critical look at historical traditions or events, empathising with the experiences of those who have paved the way for the world as it is now.

See Makiko Harris’s work at the South London Gallery until April 12th

See ‘Snowfall with saliva’ at The Ryder Projects gallery in Madrid from February 28th

See ‘No, no, Nothing I Can Think Of ‘ at Wilton Way Gallery from 5 March – 8 April

If you enjoyed Creatives Who Reclaim What Caged Them To Be Set Free, why not read From A World Of Painful Escape To Beautiful Pure Escapism?

.Cent Magazine, London. Luxury Mindset