Kate Egawa: Black Madonna and Child of Covid-19 Lockdown
Title: Black Madonna and Child of Covid-19 Lockdown
Artist: Kate Egawa (British)
Location: St Mary’s Kilburn (C of E)
Date: 2022
The project for the Black Madonna and Child of Covid-19 Lockdown (Our Lady of Kilburn) arose from the community’s experience during COVID lockdown. St Mary’s is a Black majority congregation, with most being women of working age. Many were aware of significant racial and gender differences in the effects COVID had.
Black and brown women from the church community work predominantly in health and social care or retail and none of them were furloughed or able to work from home. Instead, they kept going into work at risk to themselves so that our communities could continue to function with some level of normality, care and compassion.
During this period, the community witnessed the global impact of the murder of George Floyd and the publication of Azariah France-William’s book Ghost Ship about racism in the church. These three things coming together inspired the church to celebrate black womanhood, motherhood, care and divinity.
The artist, Kate Egawa, spoke to the congregation during lockdown, asking for their thoughts and feelings about motherhood, the Black Lives Matter movement and their lockdown experiences. These words informed the artist during the making of the sculpture.
Kate Egawa is an artist, teacher and trainee psychotherapist based in Birmingham. She graduated from Cambridge (1993) with a BA Hons Degree in Theology and Art History before taking further study in sculpture: HND Figurative Sculpture (1996), Stafford College and BA Fine Art Sculpture (1997), University of Wolverhampton. She recently gained a MA in Art and Education Practices at BCU (2019).
Egawa’s work is informed by the people and events in her life and she finds inspiration in her local multicultural community of Handsworth and responds to wider political and educational issues.
Egawa has work in private collections in the UK and abroad; in the Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edward’s College, Selwyn College Chapel and St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. She has been an Exhibitor at the Royal Birmingham Society of Art since 2011 and awarded the RBSA 3D prize for sculpture, 2020.
Further Information
Medium: Bronze
Permanent display
See Kate Egawa’s Black Madonna and Child of Covid-19 Lockdown on the Ecclesiart map here.