24 January – 26 May 2025
The Holburne Museum presents the first exhibition in the UK by Diedrick Brackens (b. 1989, Texas, US), whose large-scale, vibrant, hand-crafted tapestry works explore allegory and narrative through autobiography, African American and queer identity, and American history.
Brackens employs techniques from West African weaving, quilting from the American South and European tapestry-making to create both abstract and figurative works. Beginning his process through the hand-dying of cotton, a material he deliberately uses in acknowledgement of its brutal history, Brackens presents rich, nuanced visions of African American life and identity, while also alluding to the complicated histories of labour and migration. Brackens utilises both commercial dyes and atypical pigments such as wine, tea and bleach to create his vibrant, intricately-woven tapestries that investigate historical gaps, interlacing the present with his singular magical realist worldview. Often depicting moments of male tenderness, Brackens draws on African and African American literature, poetry and folklore as source.
Four key works by Brackens will be on display in the Holburne’s neoclassical Ballroom Gallery. In these weavings, the artist maps an imagined place —visualising the internal mechanisms and symbols that animate his work while removing the anchor of direct narrative. The scenes depicted in each weaving exist out of time, suspended between a distant past and a world to come. The works in this series are set at dusk, twilight, and deep night—hours that become
vehicles for ritual and interiority. The silhouetted inhabitants of this in-between realm are archetypes that Brackens once described as ciphers, or “needles through which I slip the threads of biography and myth, and pass through a mesh of history and context.” His figures are accompanied by an ecosystem of symbols and shapes that have recurred over the course of his practice. The animals, natural elements and man-made objects accrue significance
every time they are cast in this ever-evolving mythology. The characters in the series are placed in dialogue with lightning bolts, waning suns, and sourceless orbs of light—open-ended devices of orientation. In these distilled arrangements, footholds for straightforward interpretation dissolve—inviting viewers to parse the compositions and uncover meaning.
Brackens’ semiotic language emerges from lived experience, but also through revisiting books, poems, and legends. In Woven Stories, some of these references—alluded to in his titles— include the science fiction novel Mind of My Mind (1977) by American writer Octavia E. Butler; the poem “How you might approach a foal” by Wendy Videlock; and the Bible’s parable of the prodigal son. These stories, though dramatically diverse in genre and subject, speak to Brackens’ inclination to loop, lose, and locate oneself in that which is known, but also to shape-shift, forming new meaning from that which is “familiar.” He approaches these symbols—weighted with memory, context, and history—with fresh eyes or, as Videlock’s poem concludes, “like you /are new to the world.”
Chris Stephens, Director of the Holburne Museum, said: “We are thrilled that the Holburne is hosting Diedrick Brackens’s first exhibition in the UK. Continuing our commitment to the display of craftwork of various media, Diedrick’s rich imagery also speaks so powerfully to our history and the stories behind many of the works in our collection as well as echoing, visually, our holdings of 18th century silhouettes.”
Diedrick Brackens, prodigal, 2023 © Diedrick Brackens. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.