Artist: Yinka Shonibare
About the work
‘Beekeeper Girl’ is a playful new sculpture by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare CBE that depicts a young girl wearing a Victorian style “bee veil” over the artist’s signature globe in place of a head. The figure is studying a bee colony on the honeycomb that she holds aloft.
Throughout his colorful multimedia practice, Yinka Shonibare considers issues of postcolonialism and globalism and often references the distinctive batik cloth common in Nigeria. He also reconfigures iconic imagery from Western art history in his paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, and installations; the cultural and material relationships between Europe and Africa are common themes. Shonibare has created libraries of cloth-bound books and reinterpreted Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in order to comment on racial difference.
Armchair
1700-1725 (made), after 1735 (upholstered)
V&A Museum
This armchair is carved in the style fashionable in France in the first half of the 18th century. However, the use of stretchers, which interrupt the curved outline of the legs, suggests that it was perhaps not made in Paris.
The 18th-century needlework on the seat and back was evidently designed to cover a chair, for it follows the convention that human figures should be represented only on the chair-back, while animals or birds could be shown on the seat. The back shows the New Testament scene of Christ meeting the woman of Samaria. However, these covers were clearly made for a larger chair, and have been cut down to fit this one, probably in the late 19th century. The chair also has a confection of old pieces of webbing under the seat, perhaps added at the same time to lend an appearance of antiquity to the upholstery.