“When I was young, my life was surrounded by women who came in and out of the house, whether my actual aunties, or friends of my mother’s,” says Himid, who moved from Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) to London with her mother, a textile designer, when Himid was just a few months old. “They’re the sort of women that have opinions about what you’re wearing, opinions about who you’re going out with, what you should do with the rest of your life.”
As she’s gotten older, Himid has lost a lot of those childhood aunties—and increasingly finds herself inhabiting the role. “Now I attempt to make meaningful contributions in other people’s lives,” she says. This reflection led her to create a bigger version of her previous wooden plank installations, Drowned Orchard: Secret Boatyard, a 2014 work comprising 16 planks, and Old Boat / New Money from 2019, consisting of 32.
Each of her 64 Aunties has a distinct personality: “My team and I gathered wood from every place that we had—the garages, the cellars, the studios, the workshops,” Himid says. Once the planks were assembled from their salvaged parts, Himid went about painting them and affixing bits of ribbon, cloth, text, or even toys. (At least one unfurled badminton birdie caught my eye.)
“Everybody I talked to about the project, you could see them wishing their auntie onto the piece, and it was quite extraordinary,” she says. It’s an ode to caretaking, in all its varied forms.