Love Letter 5
Gio Swaby is an emerging multimedia artist whose work in textiles expresses what the artist describes as "Black joy ... a form of resistance to white supremacy." Like other examples in the Love Letter series, Gio Swaby has sewn a length of dark blue printed cotton to canvas using a long-arm quilting machine. The artists then sewed cut pieces of cloth to this dark ground, like a collage, and finished the work by stretching it on a wooden frame. This series of silhouetted figures stands out for the artist's masterful use of pattern and color. Before cutting any fabric or threading her sewing machine, Gio Swaby chooses a subject among family and friends, many of whom are a part of the Bahamian community in Toronto. She chooses to work in textiles because this material evokes the joyful and loving way that she experienced the woman in her family make clothes for others. Starting with her own identity as a Black woman and acknowledging the reciprocity of love among Black women in her life, Gio Swaby frames her work as "a love letter to all those women... creating space for us to be us."
Artist Statement (Pierre-Antoine Louis, “A Love Letter to Black Women," New York Times, April 10, 2021):
"The pieces that I made for the exhibition (Both Sides of the Sun, Claire Oliver Gallery, Harlem, NY, April 10-June 5, 2021) are three different series. I have five from a series called "Love Letter" and these works are large, more silhouetted pieces with a lot of pattern and color. The "Love Letter" is expressing my love toward my friends and my family in my life and other Black women. Through the pandemic and also just throughout my life, I've just felt an overwhelming amount of support from my family and my friends. I wanted to create this work to extend my gratitude and thanks to them. For me, I'm thinking though my work as an idea of visiting. So the work itself mainly is not necessarily the pieces that I'm making, but that act of thinking about how we've cultivated love and care between one another, and these pieces are a tribute to that."
