Beguiling: Yinka Shonibare, at the Serpentine Galleries, reviewed

More than seven centuries ago, the medieval cartographer Richard of Haldingham created Hereford Cathedral’s Mappa Mundi; I say ‘created’ because when he drew his map it was largely a work of the imagination. Its terra incognita is populated with bizarre creatures born of the fever dreams of early travel writers: his Africa is inhabited by Monocules, one-eyed, one-legged men who use their single foot as a parasol, and his Asia is roamed by the Bonnacon, a bull-like creature with inward-curling horns whose only defence is his projectile faeces.

Five years ago, when Yinka Shonibare was invited by Hereford Cathedral to design a series of quilts featuring ‘Creatures of the Mappa Mundi’, he told me that as a native Londoner who grew up in Lagos he felt a certain kinship with the hybrid nature of these creatures of the medieval imagination.