“In moving away from figurative work, I felt like I was shedding this external layer of having to speak on behalf of a wider group – of being a woman, being black, being queer […] By removing myself from this figurative context, which facilitates the continued commodification of the black figure, I was able to create work that felt more honest to me.”
—Michaela Yearwood-Dan

Imbued with a latent energy and dynamism, unfolding in plumes of feathers, foliage and flickers of cobalt blue, verdant green, and pink, Feather (A Salute to You Mr Magpie)​ is a singular example of Michaela Yearwood-Dan’s painting. Featured on the cover of the Bazaar Art’s November 2020 issue celebrating exceptional contemporary artists, Yearwood-Dan here captures the beauty in transience of life itself. A vast, edifying and sensual work, as if gathering speed through unruly twists and turns, Yearwood-Dan explores gender, identity, and culture through her large-scale abstract paintings that confront human experience in all its glory and turmoil.

 

Raised in a creative household that was outside the fine art establishment, Yearwood-Dan’s father worked as a carpenter and jeweller while her mother was a keen gardener. Luminously translating her flora-filled childhood home onto her canvases, Yearwood-Dan first trained as an actor while studying the flute, piano, and singing before resolving to pursue the visual arts full time. Completing her BFA at Brighton, Yearwood-Dan first explored figurative modes to more explicitly explore her identity, reaching her distinctive abstract canvases after residencies in China and with Bloomberg New Contemporaries, London in 2017 and 2018.

 

Beginning to incorporate text after each of the respective residencies, literature remains a central element of Yearwood-Dan’s painting. A process that the artist describes as ‘cathartic’ and often biographical, Yearwood-Dan uses extracts from a range of disparate sources including music, pop culture, conversations with friends or her own diaristic writings.ⁱ Set in the moonlit glow of the night sky, in the present work Yearwood-Dan responds to Margaret Atwood’s 2020 poem Feather. Reflecting on the brutal ‘slaughter’ of a bird, for Atwood the being simultaneously manifests the stark finality and possible triumph of death. As the narrator in Feather produces a quill from the bird’s feathers to write, Yearwood-Dan in the present work playfully juxtaposes the verses, ‘Every life is a failure at the last hour’ and ‘But nothing, we like to think, is wasted’. In the centrifugal movement of the present work, Yearwood-Dan captures ‘the sense that the death of one entity can give rise to a new kind of life’ proposed by Atwood.ⁱⁱ A celebration of life as a regenerative and edifying force, Yearwood-Dan and Atwood each emphasise the potency of doing good - actions that will transcend our fleeting existence.

Feather

Margaret Atwood, 2020

 

One by handfuls the feathers fell.

Windsheer, sunbleach, owlwar,

some killer with a shotgun,

 

who can tell?

But I found them here on the quasi-lawn –

I don’t know whose torn skin –

 

a splayed calligraphy of plumes,

remains of a god that melted

too near the moon.

 

A high flyer once,

as we all were.

Every life is a failure

 

at the last hour,

the hour of dried blood.

But nothing, we like to think,

 

is wasted, so I picked up one from the slaughter,

sharpened and split the quill,

hunted for ink,

 

and drew this poem

with you, dead bird.

With your spent flight,

 

with your fading panic,

with your eye spiralling down,

with your night.

 

In its dizzying energy and sensitivity to movement and colour, Feather (A Salute to You Mr Magpie)​ highlights Yearwood-Dan’s engagement with the art of the past, notably with the radical approach to sensory experience evidenced in Claude Monet’s mature Nymphéas. Continuing this legacy, Yearwood-Dan similarly explores the fascinating exchanges between figuration and abstraction in her evocative compositions, connections most recently celebrated in York Art Gallery’s commission of a new body of work by the internationally renowned artist in direct dialogue with examples of Monet’s famed series.

 

The making of a community project | Winsor & Newton

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Exploring race, politics and identity through her unbounded, lyrical forms, Michaela Yearwood-Dan was born in London in 1994, where she continues to live and work.

• One of the leading female abstract painters working today, Yearwood-Dan recently joined Hauser and Wirth in September of this year, making her one of the youngest artists to be represented by the gallery.

• Yearwood-Dan’s work is found in significant international collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C and the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, amongst others.

 

 

 

ⁱ Michaela Yearwood-Dan, quoted in Emily Tobin, ‘Artist Michaela Yearwood-Dan in her studio’, House & Garden, 18 November 2020, online.  

ⁱⁱ Margaret Atwood, quoted in Mariel Orford-Hall, ‘Margaret Atwood and Michaela Yearwood-Dan collaborate on exclusive Bazaar Art cover’, Harper’s Bazaar, 27 October 2020, online.