BIO
Madara Vimba, b. 1997, Latvia, currently based in the UK. She holds a BA and MA in Fine Art at the University of Lincoln. Madara is a Founding Director of BASE, an artist-led exhibition space and artist studios in Lincoln, UK. She is also part of General Practice [gP], a Lincoln-based artist collective. In 2024, Madara exhibited in Nottingham at the New Art Exchange Open and in 2025 she exhibited as part of the AXIS Film Festival. Most recently, Madara has exhibited at Mezzanine, London and LAX, Leeds, and she was commissioned by Hub Sleaford and Sleaford Museum for the dual-site exhibition ‘Common Ground: Sleaford’s Shared Stories’.
STATEMENT
Predominantly working in textiles and sculpture, Madara’s practice is rooted in Central and Eastern European identity and its cultural representation in the UK. Her work considers what happens to culture and heritage when it moves between places and generations, and how histories are constructed between lived experience, inherited knowledge and institutional narratives, particularly those that have been overlooked or marginalised.
The history of Soviet occupation and growing up in a country shaped by it provides an important context for her work, particularly the ways cultural identity and historical narratives can be suppressed, reshaped or displaced. Alongside official histories, cultural knowledge has survived through informal and domestic practices such as craft, song and making. This informs her interest in museums and archives, and questions around who has the authority to preserve and define cultural history.
Drawing on museological languages of collecting, classification and display, alongside craft traditions associated with domestic labour and intergenerational knowledge, Madara uses materials and processes as ways of examining these histories. In the Euromarket series, embroidered reconstructions of European food shops in the UK explore the everyday spaces through which migrant communities maintain cultural connection. Her Hub Sleaford commission ‘Land That Carries Histories’ considers histories of labour and migration, using agricultural materials, historical maps and textile processes to explore the largely undocumented presence of Central and Eastern European migrant labour within Lincolnshire’s agricultural economy.
Madara is interested in the space between the lived archive and the institutional archive, and in the power structures that determine what is remembered. Rather than treating heritage as fixed or static, her work considers it as something continually constructed, transmitted and contested, asking how identities survive, how histories are authorised, and whose stories are given the space to remain visible.