For her new painting “The Sparrow Is Never Lost” (2026), Michaela Yearwood-Dan layered earthy washes of orange, red and pink across two vertically stacked canvases. Clusters of brown and green glass beads decorate the surface, as do lines of handwritten text. “Aint no shame in me” reads one line, a declaration that speaks to the spirit of the entire exhibition in which the work appears — “The Practice of Liberation,” up now at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, England.
Yearwood-Dan, 32, was raised in a staunchly Catholic working-class family in southwest London, where she attended a girls’ convent school. “When people hear that, they automatically assume that I had a terrible time,” she says over a video call from her studio in East London, but she says she feels more ambivalent about that period of her life. On the one hand, the artist, who identifies as queer, was becoming aware of her sexuality and starting to question the history and politics of the church, especially its ties to colonialism. But she also enjoyed growing up around nuns, who, she says, taught her “how to be a feminist.” At the Whitworth, in what is her first institutional solo show in Britain, she brings those contrasting feelings to the fore.
The dimly lit open-plan exhibition space has a churchlike atmosphere, which is emphasized by a choral score playing in the background (it was composed by the artist’s longtime friend Alex Gruz), and by the works themselves. There are organically shaped ceramic vessels on pedestals placed around the room like religious sculptures in a cathedral; diptychs that resemble stained-glass windows; and, set before them, benches adorned with tiles painted in sweeping, abstract shapes. Several of these works also incorporate fragmented text (including lines pulled from diary entries, song lyrics and poetry), floral patterns and small, glittering objects such as gold leaf, mixing personal, political and cultural references to kaleidoscopic effect, a technique that Yearwood-Dan developed soon after graduating from the University of Brighton in 2016. “You can take in a full painting from five meters away and it’s one thing, and then you get closer and it’s another,” she says.
This approach has earned Yearwood-Dan an avid audience. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in the United States, Italy, China, Morocco and Britain. In 2019, she gained representation with the London- and Lagos-based gallery Tiwani Contemporary and then, a few years later, with the New York-based Marianne Boesky Gallery. In 2023, one of Yearwood-Dan’s paintings sold at Christie’s London for £730,800 (around $880,000 at the time), more than 12 times its high estimate. The following year, she joined Hauser & Wirth, making her one of the youngest artists on its roster. The opening for “No Time for Despair,” her first solo show with the gallery, saw visitors lined down Savile Row and around the block.
With that exhibition, the artist offered an environment for the audience to both reflect on “what felt heavy in the world” and “escape it,” she says, through paintings and vases that explored themes of femininity and queer community building. Now, at the Whitworth, she’s more interested in reckoning with “feelings that I’ve wanted to avoid.” She’d like to “decentralize religion, but decentralization doesn’t mean total abandonment,” she says. Instead, she’s after something more expansive.
