Freedom and Change

In 1984 I went into battle with Picasso, not for the first time but in a way I hadn’t tried before. I used a queen sized dusty pink bedsheet as a background and stapled it to the wall of a room which was in the process of being converted from a kitchen into a bedroom – a temporary working space. The work I made is called Freedom and Change (1984) but I call it Running Women. In the Picasso version two European women run along a beach their hair streaming behind them and their breasts leading them forward in a sort of erotic ecstasy. We can tell that by the time they reach wherever they are going their clothes will have fallen of them as a result of this exertion. In my version, which spans a total of around five metres and includes wooden cut outs of men and dogs, I drew the two African women directly onto the pink sheet using graphite and spray paint. One of their dresses is made from black and white pieces of card my mother had given me. The other woman is clothed in blue; her dress is entirely made from unwritten airmail letters of the type used by her to write to her friends in Zanzibar. I used whatever glue came to hand, possibly taken from the same containers that I had used to make, We Will Be (1983) a cut out woman with a dress decorated in playing cards, woollen thread and newspaper cuttings and gold drawing pins. Both works are still intact Freedom and Change and We Will Be have been acquired and are cared for by museums, the former by the national collection at Tate and the latter by Liverpool Museums Service. Lubaina Himid, August, 2026