Himid talks about how her mother’s job in costume design was an early influence on her own work. “I was living with a woman who was constantly looking at the color of things, at other people’s clothes and we were constantly in shops and we weren’t in shops buying things, we were in shops looking,” she says. In Himid’s colourful and opaque world, life-sized cutout characters are captured in suspended moments, drawing attention from the viewers as if they could interact together. “The very notion of making cutouts is to give the kind of false impression that you could pick up these things and move them around the room, but in a way I wanted them to feel like a chair or a table, so they are in the space with you rather than something that’s on the wall taking you to another place,” she says.

Lubaina Himid is a Zanzibar-born, British-raised artist and curator interested in exploring questions of power and empire, and challenging forms of institutional invisibility. Over the last decade, she has earned critical acclaim for her creative paintings, which explore overlooked and invisible aspects of history and of contemporary everyday life. She often used storytelling to empower the viewer to become an active participant in her work. She was awarded the Turner Prize in 2017 and was bestowed with the honorary title of CBE for her contributions to the arts in 2018.