Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’ work is created through the lens of minority feminism, one that tells stories of women’s resilience but within the context of their traditions. In the centre of one fabric tapestry, hanging floor-to-ceiling at the Whitworth, a young Madonna-like mother holds her wonderfully chubby baby with reverence; while in another work presented on a folding screen, the artist’s own mother sits in a plastic neon-orange chair, in a scene as mundane as it is majestic.

The Polish-Roma artist’s vibrant textile collages have travelled to Manchester from Tate St Ives. This is a free exhibition about Roma life: the people, their traditions, history and everyday routines, in colourful, richly textured, patchworked canvases and sketchbook paintings.

The exhibition is not vast, but big enough to see her inimitable sensibility spread across two gallery spaces: work that captures people’s daily lives and moments of joy in layers of vivid fabrics.

Gallery 5 is populated with (very) large-scale portraits of significant Roma figures from the Siukar Manusia (2022) series, based on photographs sourced from the USC Shoah Foundation as well as the archive of her uncle Andrzej Mirga. While this collection stops you in your tracks, it’s the Project Space I want to focus on here.

Entering the room feels like rummaging through your grandma’s treasures: patterned and shiny fabrics, sourced and recycled from Roma friends and family, with the odd coral earring for eagle-eyed viewers. Often, they’re arranged into complex compositions of people, with hands and heads emerging in bare canvas hues, and features painted in quick sweeps of a brush on top of the patchwork. The intricate scenes bring to mind historical religious painting which some of the works are, in fact, inspired by.

While men do appear, it is women and animals who dominate the compositions: dogs, chickens and horses, amongst women of past and present. In the series Out of Egypt (2021) Mirga-Tas takes Jacques Callot’s 17th-century etchings of Romani people as strange wanderers and retells the story in her own way, far from the exoticising depiction of the original.

Significantly, she includes women of all ages in her scenes, hanging laundry, dancing and carrying children, their shared activities changing little over the centuries.

As a new and stay-at-home mum, my thoughts linger on domestic tasks more than ever before and these images trigger a longing for a circle of women around me, to mop floors and chop vegetables with.

Perhaps this is why I find Mirga-Tas’ images so appealing. They record people with sincerity and warmth. Given the history of Roma communities and the discrimination they’re still faced with today, it would be understandable for pain to dominate the narrative. Mirga-Tas resists this, choosing instead to elevate her culture through dignified, altar-like images that radiate joy, togetherness, and a profound sense of belonging.

Maja Lorkowska 

See Małgorzata Mirga-Tas at the Whitworth gallery, Manchester, until 7 September 2025  – FREE entry