I think of myself as a painter but at the same time as a cultural activist
I suppose I started to think about art on what art was, really really from an
early age. My mother was a textile designer and so I was living with a
woman who was constantly looking at the colour of things, at other people's
clothes and we were constantly in shops and we weren't in shops buying things we
were in shops looking. Painting's about... for me anyway... it's about filling in the
gaps in something. What I really like to do is use a kind of whole series of
found objects, so the sort of the given history, if you like, and then paint a
history on them that isn't as much talked about. It's interesting that
where do the ideas come from and in what order do they come
I think things come at once, I like to see the idea sort of out there in a kind
of much more messy way just needs to sort of spill out. The very notion of
making cutouts is to give the kind of false impression that you could pick up
these things and move them around the room, but in a way I wanted them to feel
like a chair or a table, so they're in the space with you rather than something
that's on the wall taking you to another place
I think that beginning as being trained as a theatre designer, I can see
now how that way that I was interested in theatre as a political tool then, has
gone all the way through the work. The 1980's was just a hard time, it's
difficult to think about now that we were living in the time when you could
switch on the television and you would never see a black person. We were
incredibly visible when there was trouble but then when it came to sort of
cultural contribution, we were then invisible, so the project if you like
then was to make ourselves visible and to make work that, if we saw it somewhere,
we would be seeing ourselves. I went to art galleries from a really young age
with my mother I never understood really at the time that there weren't any
paintings that reflected my experience, but I think somewhere I took
that in. At the Royal College I was writing a thesis on young black artists
in Britain today so I was up for a fight, and I got a fight, so that at every
seminar or every presentation I was fighting
you know 'there was such a thing as a black artist' you know 'I wasn't a cultural
terrorist' you know, but I was doing a thesis at the same time as some people
were doing thesis on the 'sans-serif letter' and I realized I had a different
kind of agenda
we as black women at that time making work, whenever a solid group... it wasn't
you know, I don't know, the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood... do you know what I mean, it
wasn't like that, it was much more fluid but I think that had I envisaged making
work for the next 30 or 40 years then I couldn't imagine doing it without the...
just knowing there was the support there. You can think about your life as
being between two things... the kind of... the black and the white, if you like,
or trying to divide yourself between one thing and another, but I think the
advantage has always been that I could see two things at once