ARTE: LAKWENA TALKS WITH DESIGN INDABA

Lakwena Maciver will open her solo exhibition next month, January 17th.  Get to know the artist a little more in this interview done by Design Indaba.

London-based artist Lakwena Maciver’s huge outdoor murals may be influenced by the exuberant scale of neon signs in Las Vegas but her most recent work, commissioned for the Africa Calling exhibition at London’s Southbank, drew on her African heritage.

Maciver visited family’s home in Uganda for the first time as an adult and her installation for the exhibition is bred out of this experience. During her trip she snapped photos of patterned minibus taxis and the intricate grille work on building facades.

For Africa Calling – curated by Kathy Shenoy of ethical online store Shake the Dust and Liezel Strauss of Subject Matter Art and the My Japan photographic project – she presented three small wooden-panel paintings. Emblazoned with the words “karibu” (“welcome” in Swahili) and “paco” (“home” in the Ugandan dialect of Acoli), they are rendered in striking colours and graphic patterns.

“These pieces are a way of processing what I experienced there and the idea of ‘home’. They’re about understanding who I am and where I come from.”

Her body of work centres on signage, language and social phrases. “Language is really important in what I do,” she told Design Indaba in this interview in London. “Words, typography and language – the meaning and the actual visual look of words.”

She creates work in multiple media that lives inside galleries, on the street and sometimes on apparel and products for brands such as Adidas, Converse, Diesel, Palladium Boots, Red Bull and Toms.

Maciver’s street murals are titanic and painted in brilliant colours reminiscent of early Technicolor films. The first one she ever painted, saying “I Remember Paradise” on a wall in Miami, has lettering that is taller than her.

The London-based designer grew up predominantly in England but she is preoccupied with things that reference her African roots.

Her aesthetic is made up of bold graphics, geometric fields, text and bright colours: “This is influenced by what I saw growing up and what appealed to me – which were the things that referenced my African heritage.”