Staging subjects of racial inequality, power and a yearning for better futures, the artist keeps things fluid
In the introduction to Candace Hill-Montgomery’s long poem Short Leash Kept On (2022), David Grundy writes that the artist and poet, now in her early eighties, ‘relentlessly pursues a poetic programme, but a programme without pre-set coordinates’. She begins her woven works – which predominate in this mini-survey exhibition of 21 works from 1971 to 2026 that span these ‘weaves’, paintings, double-exposure photographs, a quilt and papier-mâché sculpture – using a handloom, without, as she claimed in an in-gallery conversation with art historian Amy Tobin, doing any thinking beforehand. She starts with a colour, then the next idea comes: ‘They are unto themselves’, she says, with this evident in works where yarns and other textiles incorporate found objects and where the weaves are painterly, not following a pattern.
In Concept Doubles While Shorts on Circumstance Rumbles (2026) the artist takes pleasure in abstraction, process and line. Formed of two intersecting squares of wool, one made up of orange and grey stripes, the other of yellow and cream, this work extends upwards, becoming a relief through the incorporation into the wool of lilac, cream, grey and green mohair spheres. Taut lines of black wool run its width like a belt, and it is suspended from a Katanga Cross – copper, arms of equal length, historically used as currency in parts of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo – via knotted lengths of wool resembling friendship bracelets, gesturing towards human relations shaped by systems of exchange. Throughout the show, subjects of racial inequality, power and a yearning for better futures are present: for instance, Some Are Liars (2024) uses a red monotype print to depict a man from the waist up, apparently mid-speech, either side of whom are ladderlike forms cut into pinewood, providing vertical supports for atypically straightforward woven sections of the work. It strikes me that the ordered vertical lines of red and orange wool here directly contrast with a line from Walter Scott’s 1808 poem Marmion, ‘what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive’.
Other weaves are loaded with symbols that, to draw from Hill-Montgomery’s 1981–82 journal, circulate ‘old truths in the Black struggle against Imperialism’. Pope L’s T Raining Day (2025) is exemplary: metal vintage toy-train tracks interrupt the textile to reference the Underground Railroad, which facilitated the escape of enslaved people into freedom. Further tracklike lines in the same work, made of leather straps bound into the lower weave with brown wool, recall the eponymous artist (1955–2023) poised on his knees at a New York crosswalk during his Times Square Crawl of 1978. A woven woman’s face emerges at top left and her arms shelter six black beads in the form of doves, suggesting mourning of Black life lost to slavery and its aftermath, and of Pope.L and the ‘have-nots’ he defended.
Atop a white plinth, Give Attention to Transportation a Thought (1980–2024) is a papiermâché animal – a black panther in a blue, red and yellow woven jacket, with each colour blocked into a triangle by a zigzagging strip of black leather. The jacket is further embellished with a narrow grey-and-gold weave running the length of the panther’s spine, the cumulative effect of which suggests this emblem of Black liberation struggles requires protection, care and elaboration to keep the history and demands it embodies alive. Elsewhere, three weaves feature nineteenth-century cachesexes – corrugated-metal scallop-shell-shaped shields used to cover the pubic region of girls in northern Cameroon, northeastern Nigeria and southern Chad. Hill-Montgomery apparently incorporated these while thinking of the young victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking. Elsewhere, in paintings, the cachesexes are substituted for protective postures: in Our Historic Children Sag Harbor Hills (1971) an older figure shelters a younger sibling on the beach, and in Race Madonna and Hot Child (2021) a mother’s arm and face form an arc around her child.
I am left thinking about this exhibition’s title – about how its ‘nothing’ sits in tension with Hill-Montgomery’s claim that she works across media because ‘one [medium] isn’t enough to say everything’. The gulf between these possibilities appears in the gaps in certain weaves where the wool parts and exposes white wall. Rather than signalling absence, these openings might suggest a refusal to contain history or delimit a future within any single image, material or narrative. Such refusal operates dynamically in Mountain Wasteland Face Haiku (2016–17), wherein multicoloured woven zigzags part and also echo the motion of a feathered dress Hill-Montgomery is captured wearing in a wall-mounted photograph to the lower left of the work, depicting her as a youthful model strutting the catwalk. These spaces of incompletion are not failures of expression, then, but the condition that keeps the work moving and open.
Candace Hill-Montgomery: A Bare Woman Mutters Nothing at Hollybush Gardens, London, 5 June – 18 July
From the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
