Billie Zangewa composes intricate collages from fragments of raw Dupion silk, depicting emotionally charged scenes from daily life. Each is made entirely by hand, in a commitment to slowness and the power of the tactile, using remnants sourced mostly from discarded or leftover fabrics. Her work possesses a material intelligence: the silk serves both as medium and focal point, its uneven grain and shifting sheen imbuing each collage with a charged luminosity.
Zangewa’s new suite of seven collages extend and deepen her ongoing project to cultivate a language of introspection, vulnerability and agency. The works depict scenes from her life and that of people close to her: cooking, resting, carrying groceries, bathing her son, sitting quietly. The experience of motherhood is expressed in compositions that evoke the emotional work of families. These quotidian moments highlight presence over spectacle, an approach that Zangewa refers to as “daily feminism”.
Zangewa’s works speak to the construction of identity in a world shaped by inequality and expectation, to the ways in which Black women assert presence amid histories of erasure, and to the quiet power of ordinary life. They open a space where beauty and vulnerability coexist, where the everyday becomes radiant, and where the act of seeing becomes an act of care.
—Jareh Das
