British-Ghanaian artist Enam Gbewonyo: ‘My art feeds off the people I meet, their stories’

The sound was a little muffled and the screen kept pixelating, but even through the quagmire of the digital universe it was clear that Enam Gbewonyo was enjoying herself. When I spoke to the 44-year-old artist, she was on a two-month residency in Madagascar, and was describing her first few days in the city of Antananarivo. ‘I’ve been out to the forest, planning workshops. I’ve met artists and historians. My art feeds off the people I meet, their stories,’ she said.

It is safe to say the British-Ghanaian textile and performance artist is having a moment. Since her satellite event at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, in which she used dance to articulate the Black female will, its reach and possibilities, Gbewonyo has been in demand. Her handwoven and knitted sculptures have been seen at art fairs in Miami and Lagos; at the Fondazione Imago Mundi in Treviso, Italy; and at Gagosian in London; and she has been commissioned to perform at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, and Tate Britain.

Born in London in 1980, Gbewonyo trained in textiles at Bradford School of Art and then spent seven years working as a knitwear designer in New York. She returned to the UK to become an art teacher, just when English schools were facing serious cuts to their funding.

She continued to make works, but it took her brother to point out that her creations were beautiful pieces of art. ‘I just assumed, though, that I would never be accepted into the fine-art canon,’ she says.

The artist’s primary medium is recycled tights (or pantyhose), which she extends, ladders and knits into soft, ribboning scrolls and mesh-like structures. The colours range in tone from pale honey to black, and she plays with their texture and density, stretching the nylon to a gossamer lightness or forming it into compact, tubular structures. ‘Nylon is so dynamic — it’s fragile and strong at the same time,’ she says.

She began using the material around 2016, when Black-owned lingerie brands started to cater to a more diverse market. ‘Black women have always had trouble finding the right shade of tights — they never existed,’ she says. ‘My mother was an NHS nurse and had to wear these ashy grey tights that were completely wrong. I just thought, “How did it take us so long?”’

As a performance artist using dance and movement in her practice, Gbewonyo was also frustrated that Black ballerinas had been compelled, until recently, to wear pointe shoes and tights that only came in pale peachy-pink. ‘The intended effect is to create this really beautiful line as you dance, as it’s supposed to match your skin tone. But for a Black ballet dancer, that doesn’t work — it was another example of the lack of consideration for them.’

She began researching the history of tights, which led her back to colonialism, the slave trade and the cotton plantations that supplied the material to make stockings. ‘I thought I could build a historical line using the garment from the 18th century to the present day, and reflect the problems Black women face.’

Chief among her concerns is waste colonialism. Two billion pairs of tights are thrown away each year, and much of that waste ends up dumped in landfills in countries in the Global South. In sub-Saharan Africa, a football-pitch-sized mass of non-decomposable waste is dumped every minute. ‘My work is so closely tied to my own journey,’ she says. ‘My family are Ghanaian, but I was born in Britain. I am closely connected to both places.’

That dichotomy is reflected in her work. ‘It seems crazy that a pair of tights of the right skin tone should be so affecting, but it is,’ she says. ‘When I was younger, I used to feel kind of lost — not British, not Ghanaian — so something that really reflects every aspect of me as a British African woman is important.’

In 2015, Gbewonyo founded the Black British Female Artist (BBFA) collective. Its members included artists Adelaide Damoah, Ayesha Feisal and Carleen De Sözer. ‘I was so frustrated when I started out. I wanted to build a community of like-minded people,’ she says. ‘Today we talk about artists like Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson and Lubaina Himid, but though still working, they weren't getting the recognition they deserved 10 years ago. I found the experience of being a Black female artist in the UK pretty isolating.’

She agrees that the landscape for Black female artists has improved in recent years, and is glad that art institutions are addressing the lack of diversity in their collections and programming. However, the intention can often feel like a box-ticking exercise. ‘Heritage sites want to be seen to be addressing these issues, but they haven’t done the work,’ she notes. ‘This means they haven’t created a safe space for an artist to operate in, so I still think there is a long way to go.’

For her own practice, Gbewonyo is already thinking about how to pay it forward so that younger Black female artists get the support they need. ‘Artists need to be aware of their market from the beginning,’ she says. ‘Should I ever be in the position where a collector sold one of my works at auction, I would like to be able to ask them to reinvest a percentage of the profits in another up-and-coming Black woman artist.’

For now, however, she is focused on her own future, as she heads to California to take up a master’s in art practice at Stanford University, something she describes as ‘daunting and exciting at the same time. Art can be a very solitary practice — I’m looking forward to being with people who I can throw ideas around with, and who understand the challenges involved.’

Enam Gbewonyo is part of a group show of five female artists presented by Tafeta gallery at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, in Somerset House, London, from 10 to 13 October 2024