Carnival Cloth: Julieta Gimpel and the Art of Celebration
With Notting Hill Carnival on the horizon, London is tuning its drums, unfurling its feathers, and oiling the wheels of its sound systems. The streets will soon be alive with rhythm and riotous colour — music made visible, fabric transformed into spectacle. One artist who intimately understands the alchemy of cloth and movement is Julieta Gimpel, whose career has woven carnival, performance, and textile art into a single vibrant display of celebration.
Carnival costumes — a riot of colour.
Born in Colombia and trained first as a painter and printmaker, Julieta came to textiles through movement — through the thrum of dance and the swell of carnival. In the mid-1980s she founded the Colombian Carnival Group, bringing folkloric music, masks, and costumes to the streets of Notting Hill. Her designs carried the energy of Latin America into London’s urban carnival, winning awards for their boldness and vision.
Dancing through the streets in vibrant celebration, with Julieta Gimpel central to the crowd in a red dress and green plaited wig.
From those early floats and feathered costumes grew Mandinga Arts, the company she co-founded in 2002 with her husband Charles Beauchamp. Together they conjure fantastical worlds: dancers in shimmering sculptural collars, towering puppets swaying to brass and drum, costumes that seemed to breathe with the beat of the music.
Hand printed and dyed textile artwork by Julieta Gimpel.
Julieta’s work has always danced between art and performance. Her studio practice brims with folded and stitched Shibori, a dialogue between Japanese resist-dye and pre-Columbian traditions of Chile, Peru, and Mexico. Heat presses, foils, pigments, and folds become her instruments, layering texture, colour, and volume until the fabric itself begins to sing. She speaks often of seeds — small, miraculous forms that carry the memory of growth — and her textiles echo that vitality. Scarves ripple like petals, collars curve like shells, and cloth holds the memory of its binding and release, as if remembering every twist and tie.
Costumes by Julieta Gimpel and Mandinga Arts parading the streets.
But it is in costume that her vision bursts into full bloom. Carnival, for Julieta, has long been more than adornment: it is theatre, music, folklore, protest, and joy stitched into wearable art. When a performer steps into her creations, they do not merely wear them — they inhabit them. The fabric moves with the body, shimmering in the light, becoming part of the choreography — living, breathing presences, transformed by the dancer and transforming the street in turn.
Inside Mandinga Arts
This September, as part of London Textile Month, Julieta generously throws open her studio doors for a FREE Open Studio Demonstration and Tour in A Carnival of Textiles. Across any of three Saturdays — 13, 20, and 27 September, 10–5 pm — visitors can step into her world of colour and sound. Mornings in her Clapham studio will pulse with demonstrations: foiling, folding, and layering cloth into textured brilliance. Then, in the afternoon, the journey continues to Mandinga Arts’ costume-filled space in Peckham — a treasure trove of masks, headdresses, and garments from decades of carnival. Costumes spill from rails and walls, waiting to be touched, tried on, and brought to life — an open invitation to dance with fabric and imagination.
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Further Information:
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Image Credits:
LEAD: A carnival celebrator in a costume created by Julieta Gimpel and Mandinga Arts
All other images courtesy of Julieta Gimpel and Mandinga Arts