About Lucille Junkere

Lucille Junkere is a textile artist and dyer. Her work combines millinery skills perfected at the London College of Fashion with the fluid character of machine embroidery. She is concerned with the social and environmental impact of the textile industry and uses textile waste, water based inks, natural fibres and dyes in her work.

In the Caribbean, Lucille researched the loss of textile traditions through colonialism. She then started a deeper exploration of her own cultural ancestry through the history and use of indigo dye. Her residency at the gallery is part of her personal and artistic journey.

About the residency

During her residency Lucille will focus on the relationship between William Morris, Thomas Wardle and indigo, their skill in mastering the complexity of the indigo dye vat, their descriptions of the dye process and their meticulous artistic approach to documenting their samples and dye experiments.

Lucille has called her residency All Blues inspired by the title of a track from the album Kind of Blue by Miles Davies. The lyrics and melody capture the beauty and complex, painful history surrounding natural indigo dye. Blues music was the spiritual connection between the indigo plant, grown in many southern American slave plantations, and the West African slaves who sang of their suffering as they worked on the cotton that the indigo dyed. These songs became known as “the Blues”.