Beautiful, strong, sweet
This woman looks at us from the corner of her eye. She avoids direct confrontation perhaps because she is insecure, modest or afraid.
She has painted her mouth red to make herself more attractive.
Her hair is impressive. Leilah Babirye has used bicycle tires to put her hair up very high.
I wish this woman would find her self-confidence, that she would stand up for herself, that she would dare to confront. I wish her that she does not need lipstick or a hairdo to show that she is beautiful, strong, sweet and so much more.
By Theo, www.artatsite.com
Mooi, sterk, lief
Deze vrouw kijkt ons vanuit haar ooghoeken aan. Ze vermijdt de directe confrontatie misschien doordat zij onzeker, bescheiden of bang is.
Ze heeft haar mond rood geverfd om daarmee nog aantrekkelijker te zijn.
Haar haar is indrukwekkend. Leilah Babirye heeft fietsbanden gebruikt om het haar heel hoog op te steken.
Ik zou wensen dat deze vrouw haar zelfvertrouwen vindt, dat zij voor zichzelf uitkomt, dat zij confrontaties aandurft. Ik wens haar toe dat zij geen lipstick of opgestoken haar nodig heeft om te laten zijn dat zij mooi, sterk, lief en nog veel meer is.
Door Theo, www.artatsite.com.
www.ysp.org.uk:
Leilah Babirye: My work is basically using trash, giving it new life and making it beautiful. It is always influenced by where I am working, I will use whatever is there. That s why the work always looks different, because I m not sure what I ll find. The wood I m working with here is a soft wood, whereas in New York it s usually pine, which is a harder wood. This gives the sculptures a different feel and contributes to their different personalities .
www.ysp.org.uk:
The artist describes being guided by the wood itself, sketching the initial forms directly onto the sectioned tree for carving. Once carved, the figures are refined and their surfaces sanded to highlight the grains of the tree. The sculptures are then burned a deep black, the charring once used to make the works disappear but which is now a gesture of celebrating their beauty. Details of the sculptures are treated with a blowtorch before the surfaces are carefully waxed to acknowledge the skin of the piece and the tree from which it came.
The final stage is one Babirye calls taking the girls to the salon , in which found elements complete the sculptures, including bicycle chains, nails and copper from a dismantled boiler, as well as redundant stainless steel teapots.
www.tank.tv:
Leilah Babirye: I work according to my environment, and what inspired me here was the team I worked with. I m a person who likes being around people and creating my own community. The second inspiration was wood: there is a ton of wood at YSP. On my site visit on my first day there, just looking at all that wood pushed me to work. The title came from the unity that we had as a team. I m also looking at what s going on in the world. What can we do as LGBTQ+ people to be together? If we don t have unity, we can t do anything. I know the power and the strength of a team. Obumu comes from omu, which is one, and obumu is many. Obumu is a Luganda word from Buganda, in central Uganda, where I was born and raised..
www.ysp.org.uk:
At YSP Babirye made five large ceramic portrait-sculptures, each with its own personality. They are created from coiled clay and boldly shaped into fundamental forms in which traces of the artist s strong hands and fingers can be seen, before being fired and heavily coated with dense glazes that on firing contribute to the sculptures earthy, elemental power. Together the works will make a robust, rich statement in YSP s Chapel, built in 1744, around the same time that the beech tree began to grow. Painterly glazes contrast with chiselled, roughly-textured woodwork and metal objects associated with the art of blacksmithing. The artworks become a congregation that celebrates community in all its forms in this beautiful and contemplative space, which has witnessed key moments in now-forgotten lives for centuries.
Babirye frequently uses traditional African masks to explore the diversity of LGBTQIA+ identities, assembling them from ceramics, metal and hand-carved wood; lustrous, painterly glazes are juxtaposed with chiselled, roughly-textured woodwork and metal objects associated with the art of blacksmithing. This will be her first solo museum show in the world. It is a highly appropriate setting, given that Babirye was inspired as a student by the work of Yorkshire-born Henry Moore, whose work is on continual display in the grounds of YSP.
Babirye s practice originally began as activism, as a gay woman in her home country of Uganda, where being gay is illegal and risks the death penalty. Babirye s use of discarded materials references the prejudiced slang for a gay person in the Luganda language abasiyazi which is the part of the sugarcane husk that is rubbish, thrown out. Her practice integrates her own unique approach to making art with her culture and heritage and long-standing sculpture traditions such as mask making. Babirye acknowledged during her residence at YSP that she began to make art from real pain but now she feels blessed by the process and results of creativity.
Leilah spoke to Minnie Stephenson at Channel 4 about her work in March 2024.
www.tank.tv:
Leilah Babirye: I was told I couldn t carve them myself because I needed a license to use a chainsaw, so for the first time, I allowed somebody else to touch my work. But I m learning from elders like Yinka Shonibare. We talked once, and I asked, How do you do all these crazy things by yourself? He said, Leilah, you need a team. You need to work with other people and let them help you. When I remembered that, I was like, you know what? I ll let it go. I normally draw from my head, but this time I had to draw whatever I wanted them to carve.
I worked with Nobi, a very good technician at YSP. He was carving using a chainsaw, but he hadn t used it for ten years. I drew on the wood and told them what to take out. We had Connor, who rides his bicycle around the area, so he knew where to get scraps from local bike stores. We would carve, and then we would do the sanding and the burnishing, for which we used a blowtorch. We blowtorched it black; it s not painted black. Then we started sanding it again, adding wax, and did the same thing over and over. I would look at the beautiful faces and see what to add and what to remove. Yorkshire has very good metalwork, and I used this opportunity to learn how to weld, which I didn t have as a skill. I then joined both skills together, carving and welding.
www.ysp.org.uk:
Babirye was born in 1985 in Kampala, Uganda. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She studied art at Makerere University in Kampala (2007 2010) and participated in the Fire Island Artist Residency (2015). In 2018, the artist was granted asylum in the US and presented her first solo show at Gordon Robichaux, New York. Her second opened in October 2020 and the gallery also hosted a pop-up exhibition of Babirye s work in Los Angeles, California in February 2022. Stephen Friedman Gallery hosted her first solo show in the UK and Europe in June 2021.
Clare Lilley, YSP Director, says: Leilah s uncompromising sculpture always packs a punch. That these sculptures were created at YSP, with Leilah making the most of what this place has to offer, is very special. For almost 300 years, our Chapel has been a place for community and contemplation, and we re privileged that Leilah has made it a home for her clan of compelling artworks'.
www.tank.tv:
I use these materials because I represent the gay community in Uganda. I started using rubbish to make it look beautiful, to give life to what people call rubbish. In Venice, I was talking in an interview about the theme of this year s Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere . I had to work on some pieces when I got on site, and I asked the team where I could find the dumpster all I needed was some trash to figure out what to do. And one of the interviewers was like, Oh, trash everywhere, foreigners everywhere. Which makes sense. Gay people everywhere.
We have two pieces in Venice that we made at YSP, two wooden works. The other three pieces come from my studio in New York. Venice gives you a big platform, and I decided to give honour to all the gay people in the entire country of Uganda. My everyday work is about Buganda, but there are five other regions in the country. We have the North, East, South, West and Central. My friends who follow me online were like, Leilah, does it mean that in other regions, there are no gay people? Why don t you ever create work about us? So, I made these five pieces, and each piece represents a queer person from a different region of the country. I also made sure to use names that people were familiar with. Like I always do with my work, I don t have any gender, I just come up and give them any name. It can be a princess that people are familiar with: one of the works from the East is about a queen who has just got married, and when you look at it, she has a beard. And then there is our princess from Buganda, who also has a beard in my work.
www.wikipedia.org:
Leilah Babirye (born 1985) is a Ugandan artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Outed in her native country as a lesbian and underground LGBTQ+ activist, Babirye's work is of large-scale ceramics, wooden sculptures, African masks, as well as drawings and paintings on paper. Babirye has had exhibitions at the Gordon Robichaux Gallery and the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, as well as the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London. She has also produced work for Heidi Slimane for Celine's Art Project.
Babirye was born and raised in Kampala, where she attended Makerere University from 2007 to 2010 where she studied art. Babirye identifies as a lesbian woman, where her sexual orientation caused her to face discrimination and public humiliation as it is considered illegal to be openly homosexual in Uganda.
In 2015, Babirye was publicly outed in Uganda's press, was denied supervision from her tutors during her Master's at Makerere University due to her sexuality, and was disowned from her family. These events led Babirye to apply to artist residencies in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the United States, the latter accepting her application for a residency in Fire Island, a popular gay destination in New York's Long Island.
In 2018, Babirye applied for and received asylum in the United States with aid from the African Services Committee, the New York City Anti-Violence Project, and the African Human Rights Coalition who specialize in representing LGBTQIA+ refugees. After her residency at Fire Island, Babirye was connected with Sam Gordon, the owner of Gordon Robichaux gallery. Gordon was interested in Babirye's work and wanted to exhibit her art at his gallery, however, Babirye had only been drawing and painting so Gordon gave her his backyard as a space for her to work.
Babirye still resides and works in Brooklyn, New York today. She continues to represent and advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community, as well as representing her Ugandan culture and queer identity. Babirye supports the Kakuma refugee camp in Nairobi, Kenya, as well as working alongside the African Service Committee to advocate and assist LGBTQIA+ asylum-seeking people.
This woman looks at us from the corner of her eye. She avoids direct confrontation perhaps because she is insecure, modest or afraid.
She has painted her mouth red to make herself more attractive.
Her hair is impressive. Leilah Babirye has used bicycle tires to put her hair up very high.
I wish this woman would find her self-confidence, that she would stand up for herself, that she would dare to confront. I wish her that she does not need lipstick or a hairdo to show that she is beautiful, strong, sweet and so much more.
By Theo, www.artatsite.com
Mooi, sterk, lief
Deze vrouw kijkt ons vanuit haar ooghoeken aan. Ze vermijdt de directe confrontatie misschien doordat zij onzeker, bescheiden of bang is.
Ze heeft haar mond rood geverfd om daarmee nog aantrekkelijker te zijn.
Haar haar is indrukwekkend. Leilah Babirye heeft fietsbanden gebruikt om het haar heel hoog op te steken.
Ik zou wensen dat deze vrouw haar zelfvertrouwen vindt, dat zij voor zichzelf uitkomt, dat zij confrontaties aandurft. Ik wens haar toe dat zij geen lipstick of opgestoken haar nodig heeft om te laten zijn dat zij mooi, sterk, lief en nog veel meer is.
Door Theo, www.artatsite.com.
www.ysp.org.uk:
Leilah Babirye: My work is basically using trash, giving it new life and making it beautiful. It is always influenced by where I am working, I will use whatever is there. That s why the work always looks different, because I m not sure what I ll find. The wood I m working with here is a soft wood, whereas in New York it s usually pine, which is a harder wood. This gives the sculptures a different feel and contributes to their different personalities .
www.ysp.org.uk:
The artist describes being guided by the wood itself, sketching the initial forms directly onto the sectioned tree for carving. Once carved, the figures are refined and their surfaces sanded to highlight the grains of the tree. The sculptures are then burned a deep black, the charring once used to make the works disappear but which is now a gesture of celebrating their beauty. Details of the sculptures are treated with a blowtorch before the surfaces are carefully waxed to acknowledge the skin of the piece and the tree from which it came.
The final stage is one Babirye calls taking the girls to the salon , in which found elements complete the sculptures, including bicycle chains, nails and copper from a dismantled boiler, as well as redundant stainless steel teapots.
www.tank.tv:
Leilah Babirye: I work according to my environment, and what inspired me here was the team I worked with. I m a person who likes being around people and creating my own community. The second inspiration was wood: there is a ton of wood at YSP. On my site visit on my first day there, just looking at all that wood pushed me to work. The title came from the unity that we had as a team. I m also looking at what s going on in the world. What can we do as LGBTQ+ people to be together? If we don t have unity, we can t do anything. I know the power and the strength of a team. Obumu comes from omu, which is one, and obumu is many. Obumu is a Luganda word from Buganda, in central Uganda, where I was born and raised..
www.ysp.org.uk:
At YSP Babirye made five large ceramic portrait-sculptures, each with its own personality. They are created from coiled clay and boldly shaped into fundamental forms in which traces of the artist s strong hands and fingers can be seen, before being fired and heavily coated with dense glazes that on firing contribute to the sculptures earthy, elemental power. Together the works will make a robust, rich statement in YSP s Chapel, built in 1744, around the same time that the beech tree began to grow. Painterly glazes contrast with chiselled, roughly-textured woodwork and metal objects associated with the art of blacksmithing. The artworks become a congregation that celebrates community in all its forms in this beautiful and contemplative space, which has witnessed key moments in now-forgotten lives for centuries.
Babirye frequently uses traditional African masks to explore the diversity of LGBTQIA+ identities, assembling them from ceramics, metal and hand-carved wood; lustrous, painterly glazes are juxtaposed with chiselled, roughly-textured woodwork and metal objects associated with the art of blacksmithing. This will be her first solo museum show in the world. It is a highly appropriate setting, given that Babirye was inspired as a student by the work of Yorkshire-born Henry Moore, whose work is on continual display in the grounds of YSP.
Babirye s practice originally began as activism, as a gay woman in her home country of Uganda, where being gay is illegal and risks the death penalty. Babirye s use of discarded materials references the prejudiced slang for a gay person in the Luganda language abasiyazi which is the part of the sugarcane husk that is rubbish, thrown out. Her practice integrates her own unique approach to making art with her culture and heritage and long-standing sculpture traditions such as mask making. Babirye acknowledged during her residence at YSP that she began to make art from real pain but now she feels blessed by the process and results of creativity.
Leilah spoke to Minnie Stephenson at Channel 4 about her work in March 2024.
www.tank.tv:
Leilah Babirye: I was told I couldn t carve them myself because I needed a license to use a chainsaw, so for the first time, I allowed somebody else to touch my work. But I m learning from elders like Yinka Shonibare. We talked once, and I asked, How do you do all these crazy things by yourself? He said, Leilah, you need a team. You need to work with other people and let them help you. When I remembered that, I was like, you know what? I ll let it go. I normally draw from my head, but this time I had to draw whatever I wanted them to carve.
I worked with Nobi, a very good technician at YSP. He was carving using a chainsaw, but he hadn t used it for ten years. I drew on the wood and told them what to take out. We had Connor, who rides his bicycle around the area, so he knew where to get scraps from local bike stores. We would carve, and then we would do the sanding and the burnishing, for which we used a blowtorch. We blowtorched it black; it s not painted black. Then we started sanding it again, adding wax, and did the same thing over and over. I would look at the beautiful faces and see what to add and what to remove. Yorkshire has very good metalwork, and I used this opportunity to learn how to weld, which I didn t have as a skill. I then joined both skills together, carving and welding.
www.ysp.org.uk:
Babirye was born in 1985 in Kampala, Uganda. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She studied art at Makerere University in Kampala (2007 2010) and participated in the Fire Island Artist Residency (2015). In 2018, the artist was granted asylum in the US and presented her first solo show at Gordon Robichaux, New York. Her second opened in October 2020 and the gallery also hosted a pop-up exhibition of Babirye s work in Los Angeles, California in February 2022. Stephen Friedman Gallery hosted her first solo show in the UK and Europe in June 2021.
Clare Lilley, YSP Director, says: Leilah s uncompromising sculpture always packs a punch. That these sculptures were created at YSP, with Leilah making the most of what this place has to offer, is very special. For almost 300 years, our Chapel has been a place for community and contemplation, and we re privileged that Leilah has made it a home for her clan of compelling artworks'.
www.tank.tv:
I use these materials because I represent the gay community in Uganda. I started using rubbish to make it look beautiful, to give life to what people call rubbish. In Venice, I was talking in an interview about the theme of this year s Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere . I had to work on some pieces when I got on site, and I asked the team where I could find the dumpster all I needed was some trash to figure out what to do. And one of the interviewers was like, Oh, trash everywhere, foreigners everywhere. Which makes sense. Gay people everywhere.
We have two pieces in Venice that we made at YSP, two wooden works. The other three pieces come from my studio in New York. Venice gives you a big platform, and I decided to give honour to all the gay people in the entire country of Uganda. My everyday work is about Buganda, but there are five other regions in the country. We have the North, East, South, West and Central. My friends who follow me online were like, Leilah, does it mean that in other regions, there are no gay people? Why don t you ever create work about us? So, I made these five pieces, and each piece represents a queer person from a different region of the country. I also made sure to use names that people were familiar with. Like I always do with my work, I don t have any gender, I just come up and give them any name. It can be a princess that people are familiar with: one of the works from the East is about a queen who has just got married, and when you look at it, she has a beard. And then there is our princess from Buganda, who also has a beard in my work.
www.wikipedia.org:
Leilah Babirye (born 1985) is a Ugandan artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Outed in her native country as a lesbian and underground LGBTQ+ activist, Babirye's work is of large-scale ceramics, wooden sculptures, African masks, as well as drawings and paintings on paper. Babirye has had exhibitions at the Gordon Robichaux Gallery and the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, as well as the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London. She has also produced work for Heidi Slimane for Celine's Art Project.
Babirye was born and raised in Kampala, where she attended Makerere University from 2007 to 2010 where she studied art. Babirye identifies as a lesbian woman, where her sexual orientation caused her to face discrimination and public humiliation as it is considered illegal to be openly homosexual in Uganda.
In 2015, Babirye was publicly outed in Uganda's press, was denied supervision from her tutors during her Master's at Makerere University due to her sexuality, and was disowned from her family. These events led Babirye to apply to artist residencies in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the United States, the latter accepting her application for a residency in Fire Island, a popular gay destination in New York's Long Island.
In 2018, Babirye applied for and received asylum in the United States with aid from the African Services Committee, the New York City Anti-Violence Project, and the African Human Rights Coalition who specialize in representing LGBTQIA+ refugees. After her residency at Fire Island, Babirye was connected with Sam Gordon, the owner of Gordon Robichaux gallery. Gordon was interested in Babirye's work and wanted to exhibit her art at his gallery, however, Babirye had only been drawing and painting so Gordon gave her his backyard as a space for her to work.
Babirye still resides and works in Brooklyn, New York today. She continues to represent and advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community, as well as representing her Ugandan culture and queer identity. Babirye supports the Kakuma refugee camp in Nairobi, Kenya, as well as working alongside the African Service Committee to advocate and assist LGBTQIA+ asylum-seeking people.