A bold and subversive longing for paradise in Lakwena’s visions for the future

Lakwena Maciver at at Hastings Contemporary © Josephine Chime, 2022.

Words by Maya Campbell.

Lakwena Maciver is known for her vibrant and joyful work which is playfully subversive, conveying aspects of our universal experience as humans through bold paintings, murals and installations which are frequently accompanied by messages of hopeful liberation. As our interview begins, the power with which she gives language is clear and throughout our conversation she lends each word an intimate attention, exploring the nuances of charged terms whose meanings can too easily get lost in translation. I am struck by the prescience of her name, which means ‘messenger of the chief’ in the Acholi language of northern Uganda. As part of Vigo Gallery’s booth at 1-54 art fair, Lakwena is exhibiting a selection of her series of “The Jump Paintings”, abstract portraits of some of the world’s most inspiring basketball players, but we quickly move on to speaking about the roots of her socially engaged practice and launching her solo exhibition last month, “A green and pleasant land (HA-HA)”.

Maya: It’s really fascinating to me that you grew up drawing the banners for protests that your mother organised, as your work consistently features short but very impactful statements. Can you explain a little more about the relationship between language and social advocacy within your work?

Lakwena: As an artist I see myself as having a social responsibility. I'm not saying that all artists should feel that, but personally that's how I see it. I think because of the impact that images have on us, particularly in such an image saturated culture, it’s a real privilege to be able to make images that are painted on a very large-scale in public spaces that a lot of people get to see. In terms of language, I guess it’s just a way to communicate with people.

Lakwena working on ‘Jump Paintings', presented by Vigo Gallery © Danika Magdelena, 2022

Many people will have come across your large-scale murals outside of the traditional gallery setting – bringing life to the garden above Temple underground station, a juvenile detention centre and basketball courts in Arkansas, and even a monastery in Vienna. Do you intentionally seek out non-traditional spaces, and if so why?

I don’t intentionally seek those places out and tend to let things come to me and decide what I want to do. I’m very happy that my work ends up in these different places because I just think that the audience who come to galleries is actually very narrow when you look at the whole population. And I want my work to be seen by people outside of that space. That space is important and significant and I’m grateful that I also get to make work in those spaces, as there’s a degree of respect and credibility that the work is afforded. So I appreciate that. You are also able to construct a whole narrative, a whole story, to a greater degree in those spaces.

But I think the juvenile detention centre is especially interesting because it’s almost the opposite of public, it’s very private and it’s actually a very marginalised few who will see that work in real life. And that’s quite interesting to think about.

You’ve just launched your solo show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, congratulations! How was preparing for that?

It’s conceptually one of the most personal works that I’ve made and it just worked out really well – the show was really special for me. Everyone was invited to come down to the Friday night opening, so people got the train up from Kings Cross and there was a coach that took us from the station to the park, so it felt like a school-trip kind of thing! Then we all had dinner together. And I think the exciting part for me is I was able to speak about things that I’d been wanting to address for a while now and in this space, it just all came together.

It was all sparked by the idea of the ha-ha’s, which is this sunken ditch that functions as a gardening device, but it became a metaphor for something much deeper that I was really excited to be able to interrogate.

I thought this link that you drew between the ha-ha’s and this illusion of openness in relation to free speech is very timely. Could you explain a little more about that?

So the ‘ha-ha’ itself wasn’t a political thing, it was a gardening feature that I would probably use if I had a mansion in the middle of the country! It was introduced in the 18th century and was a concealed walled ditch that was built to stop sheep and cows from wandering into the gardens without the need for visible fences. Around the same time as this the 18th and 19th century Enclosure Acts came about, which is kind of coincidental but it also makes sense because it was in the interests of people were wealthy and had these massive estates, people who have power encroaching on the space of those who don’t. It made me think of this idea of concealment and discretion, but the boundary being very real.

I think also due to the gap in the wealth at the time, because you had these extremes where you could have families who could afford to have a whole house of servants. And I think part of the reason somewhere like Yorkshire Sculpture Park exists now is because it's now a lot harder to maintain an estate of that size because of the changes in wealth. It just struck me that it could kind of be used as a metaphor for things that I've been really concerned about in within public discourse where there is this illusion of freedom, particularly in this Western space.

Nothing Can Separate Us, 2022.

There’s definitely a lot of talk of liberality and of openness and of inclusivity, but I think there’s actually a lot of exclusivity and a growing authoritarian streak that I’ve been witnessing. To accompany the work I wrote an essay, I guess I was asking us to self-reflect because I realised that to a degree, I’m in a position of power in terms of being given a platform to speak. I was asking to what extent are we we giving space for other people to speak, and to what extent are we letting people disagree with us?

Whether people are allowed to dissent is truly important, regardless of how forward-thinking we might feel we are, people should be allowed to disagree and not be demonised for that.

There is a deep sense of spirituality within your work, the phrase “Nothing Can Separate Us” comes from the Book of Romans and you describe lots of your work as prayers, meditations and as being about a “longing for paradise”. What is paradise to you, and do you think it’s a state that can be reached on earth?

I come from a Christian background, so that's where I'm coming from personally. But I guess when I'm speaking, I'm trying to speak in a way that does not necessarily exclude people who don't come from that tradition. I think that there's this universal longing for paradise. Everyone really wants to be in paradise, right? It pops up in a lot of cultures globally and I think most people have some kind of concept of Eden, Paradise or Heaven. This form of thinking in my practice could be traced back to 2013 when I made this mural in Miami that said “I remember Paradise”. It was all about this idea that we all have inherently a sense that things must have gone wrong and that we have a memory or a longing for a perfect place where there’s no more pain, fear or death, you know?

Hakeem, 2021.

That’s what I’m trying to tap into with the work, I think I’m speaking very much about a future place, but I think that’s what I try and channel through the work.

I remember seeing you say that you see decolonisation as a sort of paradise?

I don’t like to use the word so much now because I feel like it’s almost being rinsed, but I definitely see it in that way – not just as a freedom from racial oppression, I see it as something much deeper. I think to an extent we’re all colonised.

I had an interview with someone recently and they were saying how the definition of utopia actually means it doesn't exist, so I'm not so keen on using that term anymore – it’s imaginary. But I think it actually happens to be real, but we don’t see it yet. We see glimpses of it.

Are there any books that have been influential to you recently, that you would recommend people to read right now?

Over the summer I read a book called ‘Woke Racism’ by John McWhorter, which I loved. He’s an American linguist and writes for The New York Times, but wrote this book that I think has become a bestseller. It's very controversial, but I think he's spot on. And that’s something I’ve thought about a lot with this particular project in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Lakwena Maciver: A green and pleasant land (HA-HA) is on at Yorkshire Sculpture Park until 19 March 2023.

Follow Lakwena here.