Lubaina Himid

It's like walking in the park.

You know, it's somewhere that's inside but outside.

For me, it has everything a museum should have.

And you can read the labels or you don't need to.

I think so.

I think I could see that it was possible to design a piece of clothing or a costume that had some Japanese elements and some East African elements in it.

If you wanted to express the character of someone in a play or someone in an opera, you could kind of mix those things and have something exciting.

And it's all available to you there.

You know, you can just walk into that place...

off the street, and for free, in some senses, the whole world of making is there for you, from ironwork to tiles, from furniture to fabric, as you say.

I think, you know, growing up, I was aware, clearly, that these things had come from somewhere else.

But I think it was well into my 20s before I thought, I'm not entirely sure how these things got here.

I still am glad that they're in those museums, but...

but I do a bit of a job on labelling, if anybody was ever interested, you know, just how did... Even if it was sort of something that was information that was in the archive, it is interesting to know how museums come by things, you know.

OK, probably the V&A probably bought a lot of those things, but whether they bought them for the going rate is another matter.

Who were these people?

Well, to be honest, I made them up.

In a sense, what I was doing was taking people out of European paintings, the people who were squashed in the very edges of those paintings of fabulous landowners.

aristocrats across Europe and in a sense taking them out of those paintings and making an installation, a painting if you like, with them as if they were all at a wedding or all at a market or all together in a room.

When African slave servants were working in European houses and courts they would often be called just a convenient name