Simone Leigh (born 1967, Chicago, USA) has spent more than 20 years exploring Black female subjectivity. Her practice across sculpture, video and installation includes works that merge the female form with architectural structures and materials to draw attention to histories that have often been overlooked or erased.

These two recent sculptures focus on women’s unacknowledged acts of work, community and care. They demonstrate Leigh’s ongoing interest in African diasporic aesthetics, vernacular architecture, and the idea of the body as a vessel, or metaphor for shelter and refuge.

Bisi (2023) honours the late Nigerian curator Bisi Silva (1962–2019), whose vision and influence shaped contemporary art on the African continent and beyond. The sculpture is an anonymous, armless female bust with closely cropped hair and stands at 2.7 metres tall. Its hollow skirt, scaled directly to fit the artist’s body, reflects Leigh’s interest in the skirt as a vessel.

In Untitled (2023–24) a ceramic torso, again armless, with a perfectly round afro, sits atop a skirt composed of 313 ceramic cowrie shells. Long associated with women’s bodies, fertility and prosperity, cowries were also used as currency across Africa and beyond. They remain enduring symbols within the African diaspora, alluding to Atlantic histories and shifting forms of value. Shown here on Margate’s shoreline, the work evokes the tides and currents that carried these shells, binding local place to global histories.

Installed in the Sunley Gallery, Leigh’s monumental sculptures connect the female body to the movements of people, objects, and ideas across the seas.

The exhibition is guest curated by Daniella Rose King.

Supported by the Bukhman Foundation