Ethel Murray: Bumbil Bigin Nguma: Remembering my father’s shields

Ethel Murray creates her oversized contemporary bigin by knotting brightly coloured rope to a metal shield structure. Her use of fibre disrupts the clean, symmetrical graphic lines of the original totemic symbology. Coincidentally, the old shield design drawings by her father, which inspired this series of sculptures, were originally rendered on gridded graph paper – a method that has allowed Murray to upscale and translate the line work into this new medium. She reflects:

My cousin sister, Mrs Beeron, gave me these designs as they are my father’s, so I wanted to make artwork using these designs. Every tribe has special designs which identified them to others, and then people adapted them and created their own personal designs. These are my father’s personal ones.