Simone Leigh’s Blue/Black combines both ancient and futuristic associations, materials and techniques, critically engaging with the converging histories of black emancipation, feminism, and Pan-African cultural legacies. Executed in 2014 and part of an ongoing series of busts, which have been key in propelling Leigh to widespread institutional acclaim, the present work is life-like in scale, presenting a demure head of a woman surrounded by a floral halo of delicate blue rosettes. Hundreds of miniature hand-rolled cobalt blue and grey porcelain flower buds poignantly foreground a sacred negativity, creating a figure of a woman at once mesmerising in its intricacy and unsettling in its incompleteness. A work of immense inquisitive power, Blue/Black masterfully conjures psychological and emotional embodiments of Black femininity, revealing potent, nuanced resilience and establishing Leigh as a preeminent voice in contemporary art today.

Although drawing on the timeless aesthetic tradition of portrait sculpture, Leigh’s use of indigenous ceramic practices challenges the incorporation of African art into European avant-gardes and its simultaneous designation as primitive craft that exists outside modernity. Leigh’s own haptic engagement with the work – the meticulous, repetitive activity of rolling the florets between her fingertips and assembling them together – embodies and celebrates craft and creativity. Leigh’s gesture is multidirectional in pointing both towards diasporic modes of production – literally the process by which cultural workers globally have and continue to shape and construct objects – but also engaging with “lost” aesthetic and historical genealogies.

Blue/Black thus raises questions about exoticism and originality, ownership, colonial hoarding and restitution, deftly collapsing the distinction between high art and craft and revealing the latter as generative and capable of approaching Conceptualist rigour. The absent face communicates that cultures are not disempowered and blind but look inward: they present themselves on their own terms and are not available for consumption. The inward focus at the heart of Leigh’s artistic practice, in her own words, becomes auto-ethnographic, functioning as an antidote to the colonial ethnography that wrote of the Black woman as though she ware an inanimate being, an object or a vessel to contain the Western imaginary. In the context where both racial and gender stereotypes continue to objectify the body of a Black woman, an opacity of her subjectivity is defiantly restored through the creation of a knowing, questioning interior. She is made irreducible and not fully knowable to anyone but herself.

By foregrounding the void, a space that cannot be grasped, Blue/Black illuminates the complexity of Black femininity – part-invented, part-remembered – whose ongoing project is the reconstitution of its autonomy and freedom in the canon and the broader society. In her artistic practice, Leigh achieves this triumphantly through her traversal of temporal zones and aesthetic limits that results in an exquisite, haunting form. A manifestation of Leigh’s inner world, this sculpture is a riddle, forever unattainable and ungraspable, that nevertheless enchants and entrances, inviting us on a transformative journey into the unknown.