I have a studio in East London part of a multi creative arts complex
I don'treally use a studio in the kind of traditional sense of the studio this is
This not a place of making it's more a place of thinking and rummaging
I started visiting galleries and museums when I was quite young. Once we'd gone on school
trips I would then go on my own and just go walking around Whitechapel
I was part of a feminist art group that was at college and we were always seen as kind of the
embattled group.
I'd gone there with the intention of trying to deconstruct or reconstruct images around the black female body
There were a very very limited
range of images of African diasporic women either being hypersexual ie.a
prostitute or a mammy kind of figure of service somehow.
For me this was in stark
contrast to the glut of images around white femininity.
I've started to be very much
part of what became known as the Black Art Movement in the 1980s
trying to highlight questions around race and cultural difference that became another
tense area but it's been the terrain in which I've worked from the very early age.
I started making works with hair that I bought from shops, Afro-Caribbean hair shops and I started
making these very strange objects
This particular installation that I've made
was called 'Do You Want to Touch?' People of African descent
people often want to touch their hair
Usually it can be a stranger coming up to someone wanting to touch their hair
It harks back to a very long memory of the African body being public property
The point about these works is that they were made to be handled by the audience
By these objects being removed from the body there's something quite violent but
they become kind of disgusting
Even though we think of hair and
intimacy as something quite lovely the moment that there is no longer a body
there it's like why has that been divorced from a body?
Much of the stuff that's here relates to a project I've been doing
It's called 'The Devotional Series' or 'Devotional Project' so this project has been
going on since about 1999 where I've been gathering a kind of history of
black women that might be across a range of ethnic groups who've worked in the
music industry and it consists at the moment of a
wallpaper where there are 200 names
I wanted us to just name some black British female singers that people knew
and it took about 10 minutes before anyone could think of anybody and
actually the very first person that was remembered was Shirley Bassey
Eventually people started to actually send me objects like records. These are all 45s
This project has not only been about naming these performers but also kind of
remembering their music and collecting their music
I was part of what was called the Black Art Movement
People often do want to kind of mothball me
in that 1980s moment but I of course have continued to make
work and other questions have emerged.
In more recent years I've tried to let go
of the idea of there being a message per se but a way of working.
Increasingly that involves people and improvising and being really
spontaneous in the moment and that gets captured.
'Exquisite Cacophony' is a
half an hour video that I made working with an artist called Astronautalis and
Elaine Mitchener with an invited audience and it was filmed at the Victorian
Albert Museum.
I usually invite people that I find what they're doing is interesting I don't
tell people what they are going to do gonna do.
Astronautalis is actually working with the
legacies of jazz scat in terms of rap music and Elaine Mitchener is working
with the legacies of Dada and concrete poetry and sound voice noise
I bought them together, they had never met before
knowing that they both kind of work with improvisation
I'm trying desperately not to tell people what to think
versus what I think the early works were
because that was all these things that I had to say.
I've been invited back to
where I've done my foundation to do some teaching.
There's increasingly a diverse range of students who go to art school who need a
diverse range of reference points, starting points, thinking points so I've
continued to be teaching for 35 years now.
It is a space that I love but if there was anything that I would say to anyone
emerging just whatever you've got to do just do it anyway and do it because
you're thinking it or feeling it and it's got to be expressed so just get on with it and do it.