Comprising sculptures, monoprints and paintings made of sewn, printed and painted materials, Tschabalala Self’s artistic practice explores the iconographic importance of the black female body in contemporary culture. Holding singular visual energy, and executed the year Self completed her MFA at Yale University, Lilith, 2015, is a striking work from the artist's young corpus, touching on penetrating, socially-driven themes. Layering statement with craft, Self’s practice has been widely celebrated worldwide, most recently alongside the work of Georgia O’Keeffe at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, and in her first solo museum exhibition in the United States at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle.

Viewing all mediums as an extension of her painterly practice, Self presents dynamic characters that span a variety of artistic and craft traditions. In Lilith, the titular figure – who in Jewish folklore was Adam's first wife before Eve – confidently strides across the canvas, pushing aside painted leaves with a collaged hand, as though profoundly unaware and untroubled by the viewer’s gaze. Confronting gendered renderings of history, Self’s voluptuous and exaggerated depiction of the female form belongs to a body of work that echoes her own cultural outlook towards race, gender and sexuality. Her panoply of subjects manipulate, illuminate and destroy imposed collective ideals. ‘The fantasies and attitudes surrounding the black female body are both accepted and rejected within my practice, and through this disorientation, new possibilities arise. I am attempting to provide alternative, and perhaps fictional, explanations for the voyeuristic tendencies towards the gendered and racialized body; a body which is both exalted and abject’ (Tschabalala Self, quoted in ‘About’, https://tschabalalaself.com/).

Working from a simple line drawing of how she wants the body to look, Self subsequently delineates her character’s faces, features, bust and ornamentation through stitching. Instilling each painting with distinctive personality, the artist collages materials, paintings, paper and old clothing from her family home into her work. Seeking to fill the void for a narrative that she hasn’t yet found, the artist refers to how her depicted subjects may feel rather than look. Through her pioneering artistic practice, she masterfully and creatively depoliticises – and therefore arguably politicises – the body, harnessing the concept of voyeurism to reflect the reality of the black female experience.