By 2018, Yearwood-Dan had sold her first paintings and had enough cash to make a bold move: she quit her part-time jobs as a nanny and an after-school art teacher and gave herself six months to make something happen with her art. By the end of those six months, Tiwani Contemporary, a London-based gallery, which now also has a space in Lagos, had approached her to join their roster. Her first solo exhibition at the gallery followed in November 2019.
As a working-class, Black, queer young woman, when she graduated in 2016 – the year of Brexit – the system was stacked against her. She was bolstered by unshakeable self-belief. “My work is centred around the personal space. It’s rooted in self, in love, in the intersectionalities that form me as a Black queer woman – the materiality, the physicality, the aesthetics of the work.” She’s “never been a floaty person”, she says, crediting some of her success to her “headstrong” and “practical” Taurean nature. “My friends would joke, ‘Michaela is business first.’” At Brighton, she determined her own references, not through the European and Russian modernism she was offered in lectures, but through artists she discovered through Tumblr, such as the late American painter Noah Davis. Although she dabbled in figuration early on – more due to expectation than interest – she was always drawn towards abstract forms of expression. She now sits as one of the leading abstract painters of her generation, shaping the future of abstract art alongside a new wave of young British women artists, such as Rachel Jones, Jadé Fadojutimi and Enam Gbewonyo. Although abstract painting has been historically dominated by straight white men, Yearwood-Dan and her peers have reinvigorated the movement with a contemporary twist.
“They’re bringing their own sensibility and individual perspective to bear in creating new work,” says curator Ekow Eshun of this generation of painters. “That is to say, they’re not standing in the shadow of the past, rather they’re illuminating new possibilities in the nature of painting. That’s what’s so exhilarating about them. They work with sensitivity and depth, with an acute relationship to colour and form. Looking at Michaela’s work, you’re left with a sense of boundless possibility.”
Jack Davison
Jack Davison
Yearwood-Dan’s new exhibition sees her looking inwards and, in particular, back to a “crazy train experience” she had aged 18, when she woke up to find a stranger had left her a handwritten letter. (She takes it out to show me. It begins: “I see sadness in your eyes. Please keep smiling… and let your soul shine on everyone around you like it does on me.”) There will, naturally, be paintings – some “very large”, others “small, like bonus tracks” – as well as new sculptural ceramic vessels. The paintings’ soaring, lyrical quality will be amplified by a new sound piece made in collaboration with composer Alex Gruz.
