To create the textile works in her new solo exhibition at Claire Oliver Gallery, in Harlem, Gio Swaby turned inward. After a prolific few years of making portraits mostly of her family and friends, she was ready to reflect on her tumultuous recent past and channel whatever feelings that introspection stirred.
The resulting seven self-portraits, all made this year, comprise “I Will Blossom Anyway,” on view at Claire Oliver through July 15. “I’m exploring multiple sides to my identity and how all of those things are connected,” says the Bahamian artist, 31, from her home in Toronto, where she’s lived for the past three years. “I think about it as documenting my personal history.”
Standing before the works in the show, I was struck first by the delicacy of the fine black threads against the blank surface—the underside of the canvas, in fact, which explains the loose threads dangling off the muslin. Like a line drawing, the stitched threads ever so sparsely trace the contours of the figure’s hair, face, and body. Even with sumptuous fabrics filling her outfits with pattern and color, there’s a subtleness I didn’t expect from such large portraits, some standing over six feet tall.
“I’ve always been interested in the underside…celebrating the beauty of imperfection,” Swaby says of her decision to reverse her canvases and leave the hanging threads. We all unravel sometimes; why not show that vulnerability? “Being a Black woman, I wanted to find some counterbalance to us always being defaulted to strength, being strong for not just ourselves, but for everyone else in our lives. I wanted to be able to find moments of softness.”
The title of the show is taken from a poem by Pavana Reddy: “show me your worst / the earth said to the storm, / and I will blossom anyway.”
“I read this and related to it immediately,” Swaby says. In the last seven years she’s experienced the kinds of highs and lows that would send anyone reeling: the loss of her father in 2016 and mother in 2020, followed by major successes in her artistic career, with a traveling solo museum exhibition, titled “Fresh Up,” currently at the Art Institute of Chicago, plus two sold-out gallery shows. (A particular thrill was learning that Roxanne Gay had collected a piece from her debut solo show with Claire Oliver, in 2021.) “When you experience great loss, there’s always gonna be a little pocket of sadness connected to every big moment, because you think about who’s not here, who doesn’t get to experience this with me.”
The body language, the looks on the faces in “I Will Blossom Anyway”—they all speak to this intersection of joy and sorrow, and of Swaby finding her way through. “There’s a lot of truth and honesty needed to create a self-portrait that feels accurate and representative of who you are,” she says. “It can be a lot of emotional work to create these portraits, and then to share them.”
Compared to her more densely patterned work depicting other people—as seen in “Fresh Up,” her museum show currently at AIC before its final stop at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts this August—these self-portraits exude tenderness. It’s easier to look at someone else and see all their beautiful aspects reflect that in a work, Swaby says. It’s harder to do with yourself.
It wasn’t until college that Swaby figured out she wanted to pursue art. She was a creative kid, dressing herself in eclectic outfits from a young age. (For a church outing when she was six, it was a swimsuit and jean shorts paired with stockings and high heels—an ensemble her parents nixed, “obviously.”) Growing up in the Bahamas, she didn’t know any artists, nor did her family spend much time at art galleries or museums.
But while attending the College of the Bahamas, she took one fateful art class, an elective on color theory. “It just made so much sense to me. I started to understand: This is where I should be.” Though she had learned to sew from her seamstress mother at a young age, Swaby didn’t see it as an art form, instead choosing to work in painting and ceramics at first. That changed when she learned from the quilter Jan Elliott while at an artists residency. In 2013, Swaby made her first textile portrait. “I feel like my work is like a continuation of my mother’s legacy. Sewing was her life, it’s what she loved to do, and she passed that on to me.”
The fabrics she chooses to animate her exuberant outfits—flouncy dresses, overalls, platform sandals with charms hanging off the heels—are stunning works of art in their own right. In one of the pieces at Claire Oliver, Where I Know You From 5, a recumbent Swaby is wearing her favorite shoes: Crocs. They’re stitched with a hummingbird fabric, an homage to her beloved father based on a story her uncle told her after her dad passed. “My uncle remembered them as kids, and all the children in the neighborhood revered my father, because he was the only one who was fast enough to catch a hummingbird.”
Swaby’s practice has always been rooted in a celebration of Blackness and womanhood. She depicts natural hair, modern fashion, faces and bodies recognizable to girls from back home. “My work is so connected to being born and raised in the Bahamas. It’s how I honor my country, my culture, my people.”
At the Claire Oliver show, she met a young fan, a girl of about eight who was seeing Swaby’s work in person for the first time. “I had to hold myself back from, like, just weeping,” Swaby says. They took a photo together in front of the girl’s favorite piece in the exhibition, Self-Portrait 5, a gorgeous portrait free of fabric, just bare black thread on canvas.
It was the kind of experience Swaby didn’t have access to in her younger years. To give that to a new generation now is something she thinks of as “healing her inner child.” To see an honest depiction of vulnerability and undoneness is liberating, she hopes, not only for her, but for her viewers.
“That’s just how my work is. It’s always going to be so tied and intertwined with my life.”
“I Will Blossom Anyway” is on view at Claire Oliver Gallery through July 15.