Marcia Kure is a mixed media artist and sculptor based in Princeton, New Jersey, USA, and Abuja and Kaduna, Nigeria.
“The body is a communication device. The script, text, and graffiti on the embroidered garment recall Vai (Liberia), Bamun (Cameroon), Nsibidi and Uli script and body painting of southeastern Nigeria. These lines, glyphs, pictographs and scripts, transform and morph into mapping and trading systems that link naturally derived pigments to bodies, migration, labour, trade, and capital. The lines merge century-old trading systems - between Africa, Europe, and America -with modern day ones, collapsing time and space, fusing histories, and systems of power and production that in turn - become body, an abstracted body - a portrait of Queen Amina (1533-1610), the warrior ruler of the Hausa State of Zazzau.
The Amina Project includes one large scale drawing ‘Amina’; eighteen sculptures of relics, fragments and artifacts that represent death, carnage and spoils of war in the form of hair fascinators and four small scale drawings of imaginary members of Queen Amina’s court.”
A poem for Amina
to skin
to gorge, gouge paper,
tear, scorch, burn
incise a script
talk, tell me of
warrior queens, water drums
warfare courtiers, snake oil salesmen
erect sentinels and eunuchs
thick dome walls of mud and blood
draw me those century old trade routes of indigo and spice on caravan back bead pendant of an Agadez cross, loom, glimmer in dark crevices of gold firearms conceal amber
inhale the smell of ginger spouting
from
the earth crust
just above surface, sensitive to touch
scars, cicatrization on rhizome skin
bear roots that stretch beyond the walls
unto the waters of the atlantic -
echo
The Amina Project:
Amina: Charcoal, kolanut, indigo, acrylic on canvas, Marcia Kure, 2022.
The Impermanence of Things: coffee, kola nut pigment, indigo, watercolour, pencil, Marcia Kure, 2022.
Warrior: coffee, kola nut pigment, indigo, watercolour, pencil, Marcia Kure, 2022.
The Body in Abstraction: Skin: Kola nut, indigo, Marcia Kure, 2022.
Dogariya / The Queen’s Guard: Kola nut pigment, indigo, watercolour, Marcia Kure, 2022.
Relics of War / Fragments and Courtiers: eighteen hair fascinators, synthetic hair and wood, Marcia Kure, 2022.
To illustrate the fact that creativity emerges from countless perspectives, Alexander McQueen invites a group of twelve artists to express their individual working practices inspired by the Autumn/Winter 2022 women’s pre-collection.
Film by Masha Vasyukova
Music by John Gosling
#McQueenPROCESS #AlexanderMcQueen
20 сен 2024
