Madara Vimba

Predominantly working in textiles and sculpture, Madara's practice is rooted in Central and Eastern European identity and its cultural representation in the UK. She explores how inherited craft traditions, particularly those connected to domestic labour and intergenerational knowledge, act as vessels for memory and socio-political experience. Drawing on museological display languages, she positions objects, textiles and archival materials in ways that echo institutional exhibition formats, asking the question: who decides which stories are told, and how are they shaped? 

Alongside her creative practice, Madara also works as a freelance marketer, producer/curator and is the Co Founder of BASE, an artist-led exhibition space & studios in Lincoln.

Madara migrated to the UK from Latvia at a young age, following in her mother’s footsteps in building a life in a new country. Growing up between cultures has shaped her understanding of belonging, migration and the ways that histories are carried across generations.

Her practice is rooted in her relationship to Latvia and the experience of growing up within a post-Soviet context. Family histories, including her mother’s experience of factory work and the wider impacts of Soviet occupation, sit alongside her own experience of migration and adapting to life in the UK. These histories often emerge indirectly through materials, objects and everyday places, from hessian sacks and traditional textile techniques to the European food shops that became familiar spaces for migrant communities.

Craft has become a way for Madara to reconnect with a culture that she did not grow up fully immersed in. Latvian embroidery, symbols and folk traditions provide a way of learning about a heritage that might otherwise have been passed down through everyday life.