Gio Swaby’s Stitched Portraits Reveal the Beauty of the Undone

To create the textile works in her new solo exhibition at Claire Oliver Gallery, in Harlem, Gio Swaby turned inward. After a prolific few years of making portraits mostly of her family and friends, she was ready to reflect on her tumultuous recent past and channel whatever feelings that introspection stirred. 

The resulting seven self-portraits, all made this year, comprise “I Will Blossom Anyway,” on view at Claire Oliver through July 15. “I’m exploring multiple sides to my identity and how all of those things are connected,” says the Bahamian artist, 31, from her home in Toronto, where she’s lived for the past three years. “I think about it as documenting my personal history.” 

Standing before the works in the show, I was struck first by the delicacy of the fine black threads against the blank surface—the underside of the canvas, in fact, which explains the loose threads dangling off the muslin. Like a line drawing, the stitched threads ever so sparsely trace the contours of the figure’s hair, face, and body. Even with sumptuous fabrics filling her outfits with pattern and color, there’s a subtleness I didn’t expect from such large portraits, some standing over six feet tall. 

“I’ve always been interested in the underside…celebrating the beauty of imperfection,” Swaby says of her decision to reverse her canvases and leave the hanging threads. We all unravel sometimes; why not show that vulnerability? “Being a Black woman, I wanted to find some counterbalance to us always being defaulted to strength, being strong for not just ourselves, but for everyone else in our lives. I wanted to be able to find moments of softness.”