BY HANNAH SILVER
I visit Michaela Yearwood-Dan in her bright Hackney studio weeks before the opening of her debut exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in London, the first since the gallery announced representation last year, making her one of the youngest artists on its roster. It’s been a rapid rise for the artist, who left her part-time jobs as a nanny and an art teacher in 2018 to give being an artist a serious go. Her first solo exhibition, at Tiwani Contemporary gallery in 2019, followed, before Yearwood-Dan joined Marianne Boesky gallery in 2021 and then Hauser & Wirth in 2024.
It’s an exciting time for the artist, with her clear sense of purpose encapsulated in the exhibition title, ‘No Time for Despair’. It is taken from a 2015 Toni Morrison essay, in which the novelist and editor looks back to a conversation she had with a friend in 2004, the year George W Bush Jr was re-elected into office. In the year of Trump’s re-election and worldwide conflict, it is a prescient nod.
‘There's so much to enjoy about life, but at the same time, to feel despair in this moment would feel very natural and fair,’ Yearwood-Dan says. ‘It is a feeling that resonates when I read Toni Morrison. She is remembering the moment when Bush was sworn in, and trying to offer a sliver of hope to a reader.
‘Now, with Trump again, and with everything happening in Palestine and Israel, with the attack on trans women – the attack on women, full stop – you realise that there is no time to despair, because you have to think about action first, and focus on the positive. Sometimes you have to remind yourself how far we have come, even when it feels like it’s one step forward, two steps back.’
It is a complicated emotional response that comes through in the works themselves. Large-scale and abstract, they are ultimately joyful in their bright colours, swirling patterns and embrace of non-traditional materials, such as glitter, sequins, crystal and gold leaf. Viewed up close, the paintings appear alive and gloriously textural, replete with thickly drawn waves of paint that make bold foils for glistening materials and snippets of song lyrics, poetry or her own writings, which undulate over the works.
Looking at them and taking in their sheer scale is to immerse yourself in her world, noticing new details every time, from song lyrics that have resonated to delicately curving ceramic leaves, or the ghost of patterns that live on under generous swathes of paint.
‘It's playing around with the different facets of myself,’ Yearwood-Dan says, ‘while at the same time also playing with the high- and low-brow, referencing Joni Mitchell and Hilma af Klint and Monet but then also the artists of the millennial experience, like Kelis as well. So it’s very recent, very contemporary.’
It is a juxtaposition that carries through to the work that explores other facets, most notably in femininity. Motifs from nature and symbolic colours hold both personal and political undertones, speaking to Yearwood-Dan’s experience as a queer Black woman. In Fxxk the opinions and all the logistics, the ceramic petals acknowledge the queer associations of pansies and carnations. Elsewhere, warmly hued flesh tones unintentionally echo the colours of the transgender flag.
‘People talk about floral references in my work, but until I introduced the ceramic petals, there were never any actual flowers. It's more the colours and motifs that make people think of flowers.’
In her work, the traditionally feminine has an edge. ‘The feminine is constantly under debate in our current society. For me, it’s the fluidity and assertiveness of it, and the chaos of it. It’s the taking up space or letting something be an extension of oneself. If I consider myself feminine in my ways that are masculine, and in my ways that are feminine, or assertive and soft and strong and all of those things, then, by extension, the work should be that, it is a fair representation of me as an artist.’
Michaela Yearwood-Dan ‘No Time for Despair’ is at Hauser & Wirth London 13 May - 2 August 2025
