My work is political but it is also playful

Ahead of the first major London show of his work in nearly 20 years, the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare speaks to Nancy Durrant about false culture wars, diversity in the capital and the exclusive artwork he designed for the front cover of today’s Standard

- Nancy Durrant

IT IS, in some ways, the ultimate accolade. Put up a piece of public art in London and if the cabbies like it, you know you've struck gold. Yinka Shonibare has tapped this seam. His Nelson's Ship in a Bottle, which sat on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square from 2010 to 2012 before moving to a permanent home outside the National Maritime Museum, remains one of the most loved of the temporary exhibits. It's a taxi driver favourite, he tells me when we meet at his studio in a former warehouse in Hackney.

"And then they'll say, so, how did you do it then? And I'll say to them, I'd have to kill you if I told you." He laughs. He thinks people love the sculpture - a huge glass bottle containing a detailed replica of Nelson's flagship HMS Victory, with sails made from Shonibare's signature Dutch wax fabric - because "there's a playful side to it".

"Of course it's political. But they enjoy it and they want to talk about it." This marriage, of the playful and the political, has characterised British-Nigerian artist Shonibare's work since his early days at Goldsmiths in the Nineties (he resists being lumped in with the Young British Artists).

It will be in evidence again this month when his major show opens at the Serpentine Gallery. It's his first in a London public institution in nearly 20 years and explores themes that have long concerned him-the complex legacies of colonial power, migration, the environment and how they interweave. The Standard's beautiful cover today has been designed exclusively by Shonibare to mark the upcoming show and features a Rameron Pigeon, a now endangered bird once common across much of eastern and southern Africa. The continent disproportionately bears the brunt of climate change.