Making a richer tapestry of life
● I have an idyllic picture of Billie Zangewa in my mind. She is sitting in a patch of sunlight in her studio in Johannesburg bent over her sewing, surrounded by a glorious rainbow of raw silk — the starting point for her collage embroideries.
Her subjects are the stuff of life, her life, the daily things, the familiar, the personal. Here she is sitting on a couch reading, she is showering, now she rises like a contemporary Venus, she is standing in the middle of her son’s birthday party surrounded by children, she is at the kitchen table, and here she is working in her garden in a summer dress.
These are the days of her life. They are meaningful, because they are her days, and making them into an artwork qualifies as a radical act of self-love and actualisation — the ultimate act of creation. She becomes more herself as she sews herself into existence. No wonder she chooses silk as her medium — it is the product of transformation and incubation.
Billie’s work places her own world and her own story front and centre. This is how the personal becomes political, and the personal becomes universal. This is how your story becomes every story. This is how domestic labour and the private lives of women and more specifically black women are seen and given value.
By telling the story in materials that speak to you, in a medium that reminds you of the camaraderie you saw in your mother’s work with her sewing circle growing up. Her work is raw-edged, patches are left blank as if to defy interpretation, and to leave space for meaning. This Billie world has fired the imagination of a global audience and sparked an impressive international career. But when I meet her for lunch she has to disabuse me of my joyful fantasy of her life.
Billie is seriously busy, she is about to fly to New York. She has an hour in which to pack and slot in a quick lunch with me at the Fat Zebra in Parkhurst. The restaurant moved from Linden and I needed to check that it was still the comfortable sociable spot I remembered. It is. We grab a chicken salad and some halloumi and press pause for a brief moment on what has been a stellar year for the artist.
Her collaboration with Louis Vuitton has just launched in Paris. She is en route via her gallery in New York (Lehman Maupin) to the opening of her show at SITE in Santa Fe,
New Mexico. And she is preparing for a Zeitz MOCAA retrospective.
Half Malawian, half South African, she was born in Blantyre, moved to Zimbabwe, spent a large part of her youth in Botswana, and then went to Rhodes University to study fine arts.
Her route to this highly lauded international art career was a series of lucky breaks.
At least that is how Billie describes events that saw her working several jobs in Johannesburg in fashion retail, modelling, singing and in an advertising agency, while always returning to her practice to understand herself as an artist and find her voice.
Her first big break came when she won the Gerard Sekoto Award for young artists and had an exhibition at the Alliance
Française and a six-month residency in Paris. Now her work is in major museum collections. For example the gardening scene is in the Smithsonian, and she was asked not once but three times by Louis Vuitton to collaborate. The first two times she demurred.
“I did a portrait of Christian Dior for the ‘Designer of Dreams’ exhibition that they had in various locations around the world, so the one I did was shown at the Brooklyn Museum, so that was done through my Paris gallery, Templon.
“I was quite keen to do that because I was making a portrait of a person who works in fabric to make women beautiful, so that was quite fun. And then my New York gallery said, ‘We did not know you were interested in working in the fashion realm,’ so they sent me the Louis Vuitton thing, and I was ambivalent. And then my Paris gallery asked me and I said no. And then last year they were like, ‘Can you please just do a Louis Vuitton bag with us already.’”
The process took over a year and she finally settled on Swimming Lesson. The work from 2020, which depicts her son
Mika sitting at the edge of a pool, is a powerful image of stepping into the unknown, and is now recreated on the limited edition Artycapucines 2023 bag.
“I still think about how courageous he was to navigate this challenge even though he was afraid. I think it was all about timing. This time it felt right, it was so much work. I was used to working on a two-dimensional piece, now I had to do renderings.
“They shipped things back and forth, the team came to South Africa. It was intense. It’s not the same as when I decide to make a work and then you make a work. When you are collaborating with other people it can be quite challenging. The best part was that they were so sensitive to the artist’s sensibilities, they weren’t saying you should be lucky to be working with us.”
I wonder if she is tempted to move overseas. “My gallery says it’s such a pity I am here in Joburg, as I have such important things to say to the world, because of how I speak. I’m not intellectual or philosophical, I am emotional and vulnerable and I just speak about life. My work is about everyday life challenges, it’s about my successes, triumphs, it’s about relating and being relatable. Through sharing this intimate portrait of my life perhaps women and black women will be seen.
“But the thing is, I am African, and I know this thing could blow up any minute now, but I just love Africa. I like to visit Europe and all those other places in the world but I love coming home to Africa. I love the familiarity of this place, I love how people are so friendly. We say ‘hi’ to each other even if we have never met and we don’t know each other’s names. The sun, I am an advocate, I was born here, it’s in my blood.”