Altitude: Exhbition Guide

Altitude

17 DECEMBER – 26 FEBRUARY EXHIBITION GUIDE

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Foreward As a Trustee of 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, I would like to congratulate all participating artists in the Womxn of Colour Art Award exhibition. Since the launch of the bi-annual Award in 2019, the world has been reshaped by the pandemic and the awareness that Black Lives Matter as people responded to the murder of George Floyd.

Values of equity, care, and interdependence have become even more important in our communities. As something we as an organization have been thinking about for a while developing the Womxn of Colour Art Award is a gesture towards materializing these values of equity, care, and interdependence.

The award attracted more than 100 applicants who have tried to continue to make art against the odds that can often limit the opportunities for womxn of colour to sustain themselves and their work as artists. We were very pleased to award Maybelle Peters this award for her outstanding work and to be able to provide some professional support and invite shortlisted artists to exhibit their work in our new galleries. This exhibition catalogue documents each artist’s process to sustain their practice and actualizes a glorious movement of coming together in uncertain times.

I would like to thank everyone that has contributed to this success.

I’ll begin with Marlene Smith for her resilience, professionalism, and determination. Also my fellow judges Claudette Johnson, Eva Langret and Rehana Zaman for their time, expertise and diligence.

I would also like to thank all of those associated with 198 who have worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make this project a success.

Last but not least, I would like to thank all the artists, Maybelle Peters, Charmaine Watkiss, Cherelle Sappleton, Mani Kambo, Marcia Michael, Rebekah Ubuntu, Sofia Niazi and Sola Olulode for trusting us and for their continued commitment to making art.

Barby Asante, Trustee.

Above from l-r: Barby Asante, Sofia Niazi, Sola Olulode, Rebekah Ubuntu, Maybelle Peters, Mani Kambo, Cherelle Sappleton, Marlene Smith, Marcia Michael, Claudette Johnson 2

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Introduction “One always hopes that the title needs no explanation” When the invitation came in 2020 to curate the exhibition I was honoured, humbled and intrigued. The WoCAA processes had already selected the artists. My job as curator would be to select the work and share it with the audiences.

From the outset I was impressed with the commitment and perseverance of these artists – the pandemic meant that work on the building was repeatedly delayed and this plus the constantly changing rules of lockdown changed our exhibition dates several times.

And so I chose to call the show Altitude because it suggests endurance, ascent, travel along an incline, both a destination and a point of departure; both a place of being and a journey. More than anything I would like this show to celebrate the achievement of the artists. I have worked closely with each artist to choose works that demonstrate their current concerns. Along the way I have discovered that there are recurring themes and points of overlap amongst this divergent group of practitioners.

The award creates a context; a prism through which to see the work in this exhibition. But artists must constantly be in motion and resist anything that tries to fix the gaze of the viewer or the intention of the artist. I laboured over the installation process to find ways to show everyone’s work at its best and to reveal the common threads that bind the show together.

This creative restlessness infiltrates both the final show and the process of making it.

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Below I have invited all 8 artists to write about their practice and to tell us about a work that has inspired them. Their written contributions to this publication are as rich and diverse as their work in the exhibition. Multi-layered approaches to making meaning are revealed by all.

In Gallery One Mani Kambo motivated by her reflections on spirituality and the urge to reconcile the religious and the secular presents 9 new works. From her delicate yet robust stitched works and her revealing words we gain an understanding of home as a place of safety and growth/nurturing and a site of conflict. Mani tells us she is attempting to craft her own language out of these different homes. Finding a way of working – a methodology and an aesthetic language that works together. So we sew and we are aware of the significance of the stitching as a process that connects now with then and here with there.

Temporality and geopolitics also merge in the work of Sofia Niazi.

Her hand tufted rug, Pond Land works seductively in the gallery. `visitors are drawn to touch it, even to sit on it as it hovers on a plinth. In her writing the artist reveals the many layers of meaning worked into the rug. I am struck by the bold way Niazi sets off on the journey to create the rug, with no pattern or plan – trusting the materials and process. Niazi brings together “the fast and ephemeral digital images and the laboured, heavy and grounding rug” In doing that she brings our attention to our own environmental concerns or lack thereof.

Cherelle Sappleton’s works Machine, Machine, We and Fit are collages of identical size shown side by side. The fragments, some of them loosely hinged so that they move, have been processed photographically and each element varies in scale creating visual 5

illusions and allusions.

Their use of words is both spare and poetic; characteristics shared in their visual art practice. They offer us fragments stitched and stuck together that we may choose to unravel.

Multidisciplinary artist Rebekah Ubuntu presents Ecologies of Belonging: a meditation in progress. (7mins) By placing it in the second gallery alongside Maybelle Peter’s The Morning Has Gold In Its Mouth (6mins) I hoped to give each piece enough space to breathe and create a dialogue between them. Both artists have made meditative single channel video pieces which take the black female body as a point of departure and return.

WOCAA award winner, Peters speaks about “flying dreams” and “freedom dreams” and cites a quote from Toni Morrison’s “Song Of Solomon: “If you surrender to the wind you can ride it” as the starting point for her piece which is an installation consisting of projected moving image and a handmade net, draped over a plinth directly below.

In Charmain Watkiss’ drawing, The Return, two almost identical figures stand side by side. They are holding a canoe. The drawing is so delicate it seems to emerge from the walls. There is a hint of blue permeating the interior of the canoe and the dress of one of the figures. The piece is hauntingly still and yet the figure on the right is rendered to suggest movement. Watkiss identifies the blue for usits indigo both a sacred substance and the produce of slavery. This dichotomy is at the heart of the work and Watkiss walks us through its construction in her text below.

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Indigo dyed textiles are a key component of Sola Olulode monoprint works Green Patterned Sheets and Blue Slumber. Both these and other works by Olulode encapsulate intimacy by presenting us with dreamers. The work makes voyeurs out of us as each takes us in to the bedroom of the subjects and we can observe them at rest. Olulode painstakingly constructs these works by first making her own version of adire – an indigo dyed textile. The transition from paintings to monoprints took place over lockdown as Olulode describes in her text.

Marcia Michael is known primarily for her photographic and video work, but they are only one aspect of a very broad practice. I am indebted to Marcia for agreeing to show a selection of her painterly series Fantasm Blood Mothers. These drawings are vividly coloured and expressive, created at speed in a sort of “stream of consciousness”. For the exhibition I selected 12 and had them mounted in white so that they hover in light in the gallery – each with its own space and together with a testimony to Michael’s creative energy.

Marlene Smith, Curator.

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Mani Kambo I am a multidisciplinary artist, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, who explores the inner spirit by drawing on my own personal totemic symbols. I am influenced by my upbringing in a Sikh household filled with superstition, prayer and religious ceremony. My focus is on objects, routines and rituals distilled both from the everyday and mythology.

Through layering and editing images together, I collage narratives and weave dreamscapes. These visuals are repeated throughout my work like markers linking to notions of spirituality and belief in reincarnation, creating my own lexicon of symbols and imagery.

Most recently I started to explore embroidery and textile linking to the caste system in India where my family are tailors, fabric printmakers and dyers. Over the last 6 years, I have created work in screenprint, cyanotype, risography, moving image and most recently textile embroidery.

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The embroidery element of my practice and the repetitive motion of the sewing machine moving in and out of the fabric, links to meditative processes and transcending. The repetitive motion of creating the work is a physical manifestation of how gesture and action hold power, which is engrained in the work. For Altitude I created a series of nine embroidery artworks, bringing together symbols and imagery influenced by ideas around portals, meeting points, sacred knotting and intention setting. The number 9 represents a culmination of wisdom and experience, and the energy of both endings and beginnings.

t Good Morning, (2019), risograph 29.7cm x 42cm

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Mani Kambo

Creating cyanotype prints has an alchemic process in the mixing of chemicals to create a photo-sensitive coat for the paper or fabric.

An image is then exposed with UV light, washed in water and left to dry. The use of water, which is a purifier, links to ritualistic methods and in this case, washing repeatedly is the key to revealing the image.

My works are open to interpretation as with the symbols and imagery I use, some are universal and since the beginning of time such as the hand or the eye. Others are more personal to myself such as the Pisces symbol and the use of feet which are the body part associated with my star sign. It’s not about having a specific way to view or read the works but to feel and really look at the work and spend time with the pieces as you would spend time with another person getting to know them. Each time learning something new or understanding a new element and further connecting with the work.

I’m inspired by artists such as Hilma Af Klint, in particular the series of paintings Group X, no.1, Alterpiece, (1915), and Seven-Pointed star series, Evolution, no.14 (1908). Af Klint’s methods of spiritual guidance and seances, entering trance states to create paintings and automatous drawings are things I reflect upon when creating.

I first experienced Af Klint’s work within an art book and was struck by the colours and fluidly of the mark making. She used yellow as masculine, blue feminine and green as the unity of the two colours and balance.

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Weaving A Path, (2021) off white canvas, black cotton thread, 21cm x 29.7cm Celestial, (2021), black cotton drill, white cotton thread, 14.8cm x 21cm 11

Mani Kambo

I then later saw her works in person for the first time at The Serpentine Gallery (London, UK) in 2016 and was struck by the scale and body of works she had created for The Temple series which she was instructed to create by a spirit. I’m interest in her practice and the way her paintings evoke an elevation from the physical, to the spiritual realm, ascension form the material world to unity.

Within Af Klint’s work such as no.1 Altarpiece geometric forms started to become more prominent than the Evolution series where she was still experimenting between polarities of male and female, good and evil, light and dark at a time when scientists and philosophers such as Darwin just published his theory of evolution.

She was a pioneer of abstract art many years before artist such as Wassily Kandinsky but at a time where her peers were painting flowers, animals and domestic scenes. She felt the world was not ready to see her works so locked them away and it wasn’t until 20 years after her death that her artworks were shown publicly.

Within all of Af Klint’s work the evolution of consciousness is key.

The ambitious scale of work, mesmerising colours and her use of astrological and esoteric symbols continue to be a source of inspiration for myself.

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The Bridge, (2021), off white canvas, black cotton hands and dots, 43cm x 43cm Ceremony, (2021), black cotton drill, white cotton hands, 43cm x 43cm 13

Sofia Niazi I first learned about rug tufting in 2018 when a textiles technician introduced me to a range of techniques and finishes often employed by fibre artists. She had compiled a fabric sample book which included swatches of digitally printed fabrics, designs with heat sensitive paint and examples of free motion stitching, towards the end of the book there was a page that looked like a piece of carpet. I was surprised to learn that it had been handmade, and the technician explained how it had been created with a punch needle tool. I went on to learn more about hooked rag rugs looking particularly at American folk art, it was an unusual window into life in rural America both in terms of the images depicted and the emphasis on autonomy and craft.

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In recent years, my practice has focussed largely on exploring images of the home and the visual culture of the housing market mainly through websites like rightmove.com and Instagram. The contrast between the slick, fast and ephemeral digital images and the laboured, heavy and grounding rugs is something that I’ve been using to work through questions around inhabiting space in the digital age and questioning whether the unaffordability of housing has forced us to make do with images of houses and affordable homewares. Incorporating rugs and paintings of interiors into site specific installations I have tried to generate and employ strategies that use the digital images we consume to inhabit our world more fully and to draw attention to the hold that images have over our aspirations.

With reference to Pond land, I have been delving more deeply into questions around materials and ethics and taking time to analyse and confront my complicity as a consumer in a capitalist system built on the logic of extraction and exponential growth with no regard for the consequences. t Get Climbing (2019) wool on rug backing fabric, 130cmx150cm

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Sofia Niazi

Learning more about materials and being able (due to a research grant) to afford higher quality/natural materials has caused me to think differently about output and processes. Employing capitalist logic, the best plan for an artist rug maker would be to buy cheap synthetic materials and use fast mechanical processes which result in the production of lots of rugs that are environmentally unfriendly.

I considered this when confronted with 70+ leftover balls of acrylic wool I had amassed when panic buying wool for a large rug a few years ago. I had had a lot of difficulty tracking down the dye lot/ exact colour I was working with so bought a lot extra for subsequent colours. I wondered whether it would be possible for me to rectify this decision by returning it all to Poundland who were still selling the wool. I sent an e-mail to their customer relations team explaining that I would like to return the wool for free (since it had been a lot longer than 28 days) and whether they could give me permission/ confirmation in writing to make things easier for my local store manager. In their reply, I was told that Poundland would not be able to resell the wool but that they could donate it to a charity shop.

I wanted to return the wool to where it came from, in a muddled attempt to erase my decision, donating it to a charity would feel like spreading it instead.

I would have liked to enquire further as to why they couldn’t resell it but assumed this was probably too big a question for the customer service person to figure out and explain in the allocated time per customer query. I decided to keep the wool and used it to learn how to use a new rug tufting gun. I worked without a sketch and made the rule that I wasn’t allowed to undo anything, the result was Pond land.

t Pond land (detail) 2021 handmade rug 180 x 140cm

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This approach and desire to rectify bad decisions is very much linked to my religious practice and the significance of repentance. Given our contemporary context and the creation and proliferation of new toxic and harmful materials, I wonder whether certain actions or inactions around the use and consumption of them constitute a sin. As with most religious people today, I live within a religious framework which has been punctured by modern secular individualism. Grappling with how to confront the tensions and contradictions at play is something I’ve been trying to address directly through the way I make work.

One artist whose work and ethos has guided me through this thinking is Swedish-born Norwegian textile artist Hannah Ryggen (1894-1970). I came across her work at Modern Art Oxford in 2018 and it stuck with me. I was so taken by the detailed images and political messages she had laboriously and skilfully woven and was shocked to learn that she worked directly onto the loom without detailed reference drawings. I ordered Woven Manifestos at the beginning of the first national lockdown in 2020, and found some solace in slowly absorbing a book filled with the work of an artist who lived remotely and worked at a natural pace.

Both the subject of her work and the processes she employed in order to prepare the materials for her tapestries taught me that urgent work could be made using traditional crafts and materials sourced from the local environment. Ryggen used wool that she dyed naturally using plants and the urine (as mordent) of drunk people in her local area1 .

t High Hopes Low Ceilings (2021) batik painting, acrylic on calico, 150x300cm

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Hannah Ryggen: Woven Manifestos (Marit Paasche, Esther Schlicht published by Prestel, 2019) 19

Using capitalist logic, processing and/or dyeing your own wool for tapestries or rugs today is economically idiotic, given the amount of time and associated costs. But Ryggen’s practice gave me a glimpse into the life that art can give you, a textured and natural life that was at once rare and more valuable than the one achieved by focussing solely the economic viability of the art one could produce. Over the past 18 months I have spent time with my friends and peers learning how natural wool is processed, spun and dyed and incorporating this knowledge into my practice both in terms of preparing wool and making more ethical decisions about material purchases. I have a long way to go before achieving anywhere near a ‘neutral impact’ on the environment and there may be no way to disown my deeds, but knowing that the companies that benefit from the sale of unsustainable materials also wish to have nothing to do with them is a stark reminder that we cannot expect them to take the lead or even help us to make decisions that are best for us and our environment.

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t Wall 4 (2019) batik painting, acrylic on calico,150cm x 200cm

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Cherelle Sappleton We are a cooperative and collection of organisms named Cherelle.

Our practice centres on photographic media with an interest in feminist agendas utilising abstraction. Blending these elements together, the work we make uses the black female body as a starting point to explore and respond to issues of representation, agency and the materiality of mainstream photographic images primarily via collage but also moving image and photography.

Our process is largely material-driven, collecting a range of surfaces and source imagery, allocating time for experimentation and meditation. We rely on our relationship with mind, body and intuition to drive our making process. We use collage to digest images and media that has historically erased and misrepresented us. We reinscribe our existence using these images, reformulating and presenting alternative ways to articulate blackness and femininity.

Start with lashings of abstraction. Think Jaramillo, Chase-Riboud, Bowling, Krasner, Moran, Rae, Whitten, Brown etc. through which you can find liberation from the confines of figuration. Combine with music to articulate and focus emotion followed by feminism cuz obvs everyone needs plenty of that but be sure that The Uses Of the Erotic and The Black Body in Ecstacy are added first above all things. Fold in Collage to catalyse and invite the uncanny, chance, generosity, delight and the contrary. Agitate whilst dancing, make a wild, joyful noise then place somewhere warm in the sun. Turn your face to the sun, breathe in deeply. The mixture will find its own form or forms unlikely to be duplicated or repeated, therein lies the joy. Don’t expect to make what came before.

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Fit (detail), (2020), mixed media - giclee print, leatherette, plasticised string mounted on wood, 84cm x118cm 23

We are Magpies stealing bits and pieces we like and locking them away forever in our brain. We can’t choose one artwork so let us select three as it’s a magic number- there is no hierarchy to this selection.

1. Virginia Jaramillo’s, Untitled 1971: When we close our eyes, to think of this painting, we think of the freedom summer brings and the extended sense of time the long days that accompany it. Of having time to think in green spaces pinching blades of grass between index and forefinger gently tugging from the root sliding along the stem and giving way as the tip tapers. Tracing the razor-sharp lines, barely perceptible in certain lights and so deliciously executed, is as satisfying to me as slowly and lowering our aching tired body into fragrant warm water.

2. John Stezaker’s Pair IV, 2007: Where the line drips with a slow, meditative seduction one can sink into in Jaramillo’s deep green vision, the line in this and many other of his works mark a harsh boundary. Its magic lies where the landscape and Hollywood kissing scene meet and line up. Deceptively simple and yet continuously perplexing- three images are seen where two are on display. It’s a puzzle. Seeing is and isn’t. The lesson learnt from Stezaker is that patience and persistence pay off, restrain and simplicity are not about being austere or miserly, it can be a generous gift of space, a temptation to come closer.

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Machine Machine (2020), mixed media - giclee print, eyelets, leatherette mounted on wood, 84cm x 118cm 25

3. Didier William’s, non tout ansanm 2018 (we all together): We haven’t been lucky enough to see Didier William’s works in the flesh yet so digital impressions of his work have had to suffice for inspiration so far. This painting, is one of several included in a Hyperallergic review written by Seph Rodney a few years back. We had never seen anything like them before. The painting answered a problem we had been struggling over for many years, how can we depict the figure without being overly explicit? Using the silhouette might seem obvious and I had considered this but even tracing the silhouette can reveal sex and gender, my attempts had not been successful thus far. Somehow Didier’s figures are ambiguous genderless actors. Their forms are and strong with flesh made from hundreds of unblinking eyes, a body gazing back from every surface. non tout ansanm, one of the least densely composed paintings from the series that uses 3 key female activists in the Haitian revolution as its inspiration in some ways, is my least favourite but it was the first we saw. The one that drew us into entertaining maximalist aesthetics and to dare ourselves to stretch our practice to use pattern and texture as a substitute for our body, to invite ‘more is more’ in and see where it took us.

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Fit (detail) (2020), mixed media - giclee print, leatherette, plasticised string mounted on wood, 84cm x118cm 27

Rebekah Ubuntu I am a multidisciplinary artist, musician and university lecturer based in London, UK. I make work exploring speculative fiction, ecologies and belonging through voice and sound art, electronic music (composition and improvisation), moving image, writing and performance. I also cocreate in mixed reality, installation, podcasts and workshops.

I use sound as the foundational material for all my work and this has been the case since around 2016. Once I realised how important sound was to my process, especially as my starting point, my practice felt much more aligned and integrated. From there, depending on the project, other materials come into play such as my voice, my body, nature, writing, 3D and moving images, electronic music (composition and improvisation), performance and mixed reality. My current practice is concerned with the concept of belonging (to self and to planet) and how this intersects with climate and disability justice.

My audience includes fellow disabled and neurodivergent folx, climate and disability justice enthusiasts, Black speculative / visionary artform nerds, atsro and tarot explorers, folx who get excited about finding queerness in unexpected places and those who, like me, are prioritising their healing and in doing so, reclaiming a sense of intrinsic belonging. My work, practice and process give me permission to breathe, listen and sense deeply; to journey back to myself, back to wholeness, back to life. This is my offering.

A work of art that has inspired me and caught my imagination is Hannah Catherine Jones’ ‘Owed to Diaspora(s)’, 2020, mixed-media installation.

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Ecologies of Belonging: a meditation in progress (2021) Sonic-visual: single screen projection (7 mins) still 29

Rebekah Ubuntu

Jones describes the work thus: “...The Oweds are my ongoing attempts to own a narrative, one that is simultaneously joyful, traumatic, depressive, hopeful, non-linear, and that is often owned and obfuscated by white noise. Owed to Diaspora(s) is the latest version of this attempted, singular, collective, historical, contemporary stories…You may hear an uncanny sound, voice-like but non-human. Searching, shrieking, scanning the air for pitch, snatching at rhythm, grasping for the truth whilst trusting intuitive signs. This is what it feels like to play the theremin. This is what it feels like to tell this story.”

Hannah Catherine Jones is one of very few artists that I feel a strong canonical, conceptual and creative connection. I feel we are in sync, creating works which speak, sing and harmonise with each other. In particular my works: ‘Despair, Hope and Healing: Three Movements for Climate Justice’, (2019) and ‘Ecologies of Belonging: a Meditation in Progress’, (2021) feel like a call to Jones’ Oweds series which in turn seem to answer. It isn’t often that I find artists creating from a similar place and in a similar way. It feels uncanny in the best way and fills me with joy.

My work ‘Ecologies of Belonging (a Meditation in Progress)’ is currently exhibited at both 198 Contemporary Art Gallery and Vital Capacities following successful commission as part of Margate Now Festival 2021.

Recently, my audio art project ‘Autism and the City: a Sonic Diary’ was featured on BBC Radio 6 following successful co-commission by the BBC, Institute of Contemporary Art (UK) and NTS Radio. t

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Ecologies of Belonging: a meditation in progress (2021) Sonic-visual: single screen projection (7 mins) still 31

In 2019 Tate Modern commissioned me to perform and showcase my long term sonic-visual Despair, Hope and Healing: Three Movements for Climate Justice in response to the Olafur Eliasson exhibit. In tandem, Tate Modern’s Uniqlo Lates invited me to discuss the influence of speculative fiction in my work. Shape Arts have since selected ‘Despair, Hope and Healing’ for exhibition in ground-breaking augmented reality app Unfolding Shrines which launched in Spring 2021.

My solo and collaborative works have been showcased at BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 6, Tate Modern and Tate Britain, Frieze London, Barbican Centre, Adam Mickiewicz Institute (Poland), Diametre Gallery (Paris), New Art Exchange (Nottingham), Four Four Gallery (Nottingham), FACT (Liverpool) and London’s Serpentine Galleries among others.

I am a Jerwood Arts Bursary recipient (2021), an Adam Reynolds Award finalist (2021) and a Womxn of Colour Art Award finalist (2021).

I have taught and guest lectured at Central Saint Martins, Wimbledon College of Arts, King’s College London, SOAS University of London, Tate Modern, University of the Arts London, The Place Contemporary Dance Trust, Siobhan Davies Dance Company, and The University of the Underground.

I have mentored artists as part of Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) grant, Wysing Arts Centre’s Amplify project and LGBTQ Outside’s Queer Youth Arts Collective.

I identifiy as Black, queer, genderqueer and disabled. Intersectional queer, transfeminist, disability and climate justice perspectives, practices and languages are central components of my praxis and research. t

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Ecologies of Belonging: a meditation in progress (2021) Sonic-visual: single screen projection (7 mins) still 33

Maybelle Peters Themes of leisure, labour and movement are drawn together in this work. The starting point focused on ideas of embodied motion and exploring what forms of movement could be used to influence the animation. I began with the ‘flying’ dreams I rarely but memorably have. The work has been shaped by possibilities of flight as seen through magic tricks such as levitation. The alchemic nature of animation lends itself well to defying gravity and this idea has been a theme I’ve wanted to revisit for some time. Freedom dreams and their place in oral narratives and Black radical thought continue to affect the type of animation I make. It was Claudette Johnson who mentioned Toni Morrison’s book, Song of Solomon during a mentoring session. The book’s last line, ‘If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it’, helped me to think about how I wanted the body to move and the form that body should take. I’ve been using computers to make work more frequently. I find the challenge to work within the technical constraints and bypass them part of the attraction.

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I’ve started using a form of haptic modelling. This approach to making CGI comes from the value of touch in sensing and making objects but also acknowledges a dearth of 3D models available such as black hairstyles. A series of knitted works produced whilst the computer generated the sequence of images has become the result of using haptic modelling. The net I’ve made was created during the period when the computer was generating the images. The manual process evident in the completed net bears the visible labour whilst the computational process is hidden. It is these convergent themes of leisure, labour and movement that inform my practice.

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Mama Lou (1994) animated film (6mins 10sec) still 35

My practice is driven by an interest in movement and the recreation of motion using animation. Most of my work is made with computer generated images and 16mm film. More recently, I have included activities that can be described as leisurely pursuits.

I have used walking, gardening and knitting as part of my work. In much the same way that animation techniques are used to make and alter time, my work plays on how the use of time and space is categorised. Work, leisure, craft, computing and time become indistinguishable. This has become more noticeable during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I have been making work intermittently since 1988. The opportunity to explore techniques and try ideas with available technology as a technician led me to develop a full-time practice since 2019.

Thinking about an audience tends to end in producing a proxy of something I want to make.

If I had to think of an audience, it would be anyone who finds themselves staring at something and wondering. I’d interpret an interest in getting near to a work I’d made to see what is going on as encouraging.

I would like viewers to take what comes to them without feeling that they must find an answer. Very often it’s a feeling I’m trying to communicate to viewers. There are times when I begin to build a story around a moving image piece. This helps to focus my attention and in turn, can lead the viewer somewhere too. My aim is to use animation as a visual effect to make an often unreal existence more concrete.

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Mama Lou (1994) animated film (6mins 10sec) still 37

Maybelle Peters

I received a BA(Hons) in Animation from Farnham, Surrey (University for the Creative Arts) MA in Digital Arts Middlesex University Currently PhD candidate at University for the Creative Arts A piece of work I found inspirational is Black Audio Film Collective’s Expeditions: Signs of Empire/Images of Nationality (tape/slide), 1983, 40 min.

I can’t be certain if I saw ‘Expeditions’ in its entirety or an excerpt.

What was memorable and transformative was the realisation that I could make work in a way that made sense to me. I could use animation in a way that I had no idea up until that moment, was possible. I was a fledgling animation student who really needed to see that.

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The Morning Has Gold In Its Mouth, (2021)single channel video installation with net 39

Charmaine Watkiss My practice addresses themes including diaspora, ritual, tradition, ancestry, and cosmology. Pencil and paper are my main materials of choice, and as the work develops, I often include other materials such as watercolour, wax, ink, coloured pencil etc. I use layering of material as a way of weaving additional narratives into the work, allowing the material to speak in a way that the drawing itself can’t. Drawing is central to my practice, and I use the language of drawing when executing works in other media such as video, and printmaking.

The work in this show, The Return, evolved out of my research around indigo and its production on the slave plantations in America and the Caribbean. This colour was once one of the world’s most valued pigments, and at the height of its production more valuable than gold. This colour connects to great suffering and also to the deeply mystical. It is this dichotomy that I chose to explore with the work. Reading accounts of plantation life was challenging, I came to a point where it occurred to me that the majority of enslaved people who died were not afforded a proper memorial - so I felt that I needed to somehow address that with this work.

But I also wanted to incorporate the sacred side of Indigo.

I constructed a narrative of two women holding a boat, one representing a contemporary woman, the other is her ancestral companion - who is the mediator between this world and the next.

Her dress shows drawings of cosmograms and symbols inspired by ancient African Writing systems. She also wears various talismans and charms, one of which is the Adinkra symbol ‘WAWA ABA’ which means ‘seed of the wawa tree’. t

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They Didn’t Come to Stay, (2017). Pencil, graphite powder, silver wax, acrylic and ink on Fabriano paper. 135cm x 175.7 cm 41

In Akan culture, the wawa tree is viewed as a symbol of someone who is strong and resilient, physically, or mentally. To the Akans, the tree serves as a reminder to persevere even in the most difficult of times. Inscribed inside the boat is the infinity symbol, which talks about the cycle of life / death / life - and refers to the infinite in the cosmos. There are also the 4 directions inscribed in the boat - Earth / Air / Fire and Water. The blue which lines the boat is handmade watercolour, I used pure indigo pigment and mixed it with carbon, because this element constitutes 18% of the human body.

A work which has inspired me and my practice is Conversation (1981) by Barrington Watson. I first became aware of his work when I visited the National Gallery of Jamaica in 2016, the year that the artist had passed. It is a composition of 3 women on ‘wash day’ having a conversation - they are contained in their own world completely unaware of the viewer. What struck me about this work are the beautiful colours - pinks, greens, oranges - all harmoniously worked into the clothing of the women. And their stance, one woman with her arms crossed, the other two stand with one hand on the hip, one foot slightly in front of the other. The way I remember my mother’s generation standing when they were chatting in Brixton or Ridley Road market. I love the ordinariness of this image, and yet it is extraordinary because we don’t often see ourselves portrayed in this manner. I realised that this work had a profound effect on me after I made, They Didn’t Come to Stay, 2017 - because when I reflected on that work that I had made of 3 women - I realised that unconsciously Barrington Watson’s painting had informed that work; and also inspired me to make work about black women which shows our strength, vulnerability and dignity. t

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The Return (2018) Pencil, graphite powder, carbon, hand-made indigo watercolour on Canson paper 130cm x 175cm 43

Sola Olulode I am principally a painter working on the encapsulation of intimacies and the relationality of queer Black Womxn’s stories. Traditionally my practice has been based in figurative oil painting on canvas, traditional dyeing techniques, and use of pastels. My own version of Adire – an indigo-dyed textile made in Nigeria – soaks an aspect of my heritage into the very fabric of my painting, the first step in exploring a personal expression of figuration. I use wax to form intricate and lineal resistance patterns which elevate my backgrounds and enhance the figures in the foreground.

However, the challenges of the last two years led to an exploration of work through monoprints during lockdown. These have formed the basis of transition for my current series which investigates the intimacies of private space found in the bedroom. The bed series looks to the private space of the bed(room) as a spacetime of care and tenderness, a location in which my figures can be away from the outside world and in which relations are tethered through intimacies and tactility. These monoprints have provided a blueprint for my bed series moving forward in which to actualise the prints into larger pieces. Alongside a shift of the space my practice focuses on, I have started to transition the form of my paintings from ‘traditional’ stretched canvas on bars, to free flowing wall hangings. As a result of this I aim to queer a sense of the ‘proper’ artistic practice and form found within fine art, and hope to reconceptualise the potentiality of artistic practices.

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Green Patterned Sheets (2021) Indigo, batik, oil, oilpastels, pigment on canvas hung from wood 102cm x 122cm 45

I make my works primarily as part of a therapeutic practice for myself to explore concepts and emotions that hold significance for me but I so enjoy sharing the work. I hope that people from my communities see and connect with the figures and feel that they are reflected in the works. I intend for the moods of the people in the works to radiate from the canvases so that the audience feels the same love and joy of relationships I am trying to portray. The film If Beale Street Could Talk directed by Barry Jenkins based on James Baldwin’s of the same name has influenced this body significantly. When I first watched the film in the cinema I was captured by its colour palette and the narrative of the young couple. As I watched the flitting back and forth between the beginnings of their romance blooming and their present day separation and fight against unjust incarceration I became more and more heartbroken and by the end devastated, I felt completely hopeless that institutional racism had prevailed and there was no happy ending. Although I value the importance of telling the realities of life in stories like this I also found it disheartening to realise that minorities, particularly black and queer people were never aforded a love story in art that wasn’t framed by struggle, the politics of their identities and mistreated from the world. What I had to look back on to consider the film was that there was hope in the many different displays of love in action and in the beauty of the way the love story was filmed. In my own work I decided to focus on purely the emotions of falling in love. My figures exist as a dreamstate desire for love to not be shrouded in identity politics and in that the figures live in their own bubble of happiness.

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Blue Slumber (2021) Indigo, batik, oil, oil pastels, pigment on canvas hung from wood 102cm x 122cm 47

Marcia Michael As a Black Womxn, I am not so foolish to believe that this country my mother came to and was born into as a colonial subject from Jamaica holds my history, I once did.

I do not rely on the colonial archives to know my history, nor my future, for they have colluded, concealed, and constructed a narrative of their own choosing based on a need to reduce Others to shame, to tears and to have no belief in oneself, one’s past or indeed one’s future. A thought enters my mind that makes me believe that they wanted me to think that they, Great Britain, were the construction of me and my family and that before them we were nothing.

My body had a yearning for the past and began to talk to itself and awaken in me the need to not just photographically document the family that I was born into and was creating for myself as seen in the works The Study of Kin, (2009), but that through this encounter, I would be able to reconstruct those fragments of history that had been lost to time, movement of place and bodies that could no longer pass on the information I yearned for. As I began my search for understanding, from this standpoint now, I understood that this search and recovery was to become the fundamental structure of my art practice. I relied on my body and presence as the archive and I harnessed the power of imagination which Toni Morrison claims ‘is bound up with memory (Morrison, 1995, p. 98).

And through this extension of relying on the body which remembers not just my world but the world of others, I too came to understand from my mother through the collaborative series The Object of My Gaze (2015 –ongoing), that the body is also a living archive, one which can bring forth what is required, by reclaiming the same process that is achieved to retrieve and contain information that our ancestors utilized; call and response. And in this case, enhanced and remembered by a mother and daughter photographic conversation, is this a ritual?

My role, therefore in my political practice, is to construct my own familial archive, simply because I can, and I must. t

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Native Resistance (2017), Photograph 50.8cm x 76.2cm 49

Showing those in my cultural sphere that if I can do it, they can too. I no longer permit the silences that I have felt for my kin.

The women before me such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, awakened not just the possibilities on how to see and be, but they all acknowledged the requisite for imagination to be present, in order to regain and reclaim. I continue to learn this through my multidisciplinary practice, creating remembrances and experiences that the body has brought forth through the mediums of photography, video, sound, writing, ceramics and drawing.

My practice I hope will allow the future to tell a story of the past, this my now present, using my words and my body as evidence. This is the fundamental art of my practice – to leave evidence.

I establish myself, in an uncomfortable zone of exploring why and what it is that I do with my own body and my own life experiences. I believe that I have instigated myself through my practice as a time traveller of sorts, reaching for a utopian notion of possibilities that is harnessed by the power of the sun, reflecting off our Black bodies. Using Sun Ra words in Space is the Place, I am reminded that like many of us who are here doing the work, through our respective art practices ‘ I came from a dream that the black man dreamed long ago. I’m actually a presence sent to you by your ancestors.” Sun Ra. I have a favourite picture that sits in Tate Britain, Saint Eulalia by John William Waterhouse. Recently, I noticed the painting next to it by John Everett Millais.

I had the feeling that I had overlooked this one for years, however, DewDrenched Furze (1889–90) was presented in 2009, (available: https://www.tate. org.uk/art/artworks/millais-dew-drenched-furze-t12865). t John Everett Millais (1829-1896) Dew-Drenched Furze, 1889-90

Oil on canvas 173 x 1230 x 27 mm Presented by Geoffroy Millais in memory of his late father, Sir Ralph Millais Bt 2009T12865 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: John_Everett_Millais_-_ Dew-Drenched_Furze_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg 50

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Despite the racial dialogue that was present in the UK when the piece was made, the painting of a misty and musty landscape, that in colours of faded browns, greys and greens, revealed for me layers of fauna that resonated with the notion of travelling back, by going forward to a place. Millais painting inspired me to walk barefooted on the ground, feeling the earth and find a way to reconnect to my foremothers. In this place my senses were heightened, almost triggered.

Experiencing the warmth of the land, and smelling the freshness of life then, my imagination was stirred. Like a hallucinogenic scene, I was drawn into what lay beyond the trees in the background. I felt like I was feeling a memory, like I was in a time before, and this image was a portal to a home I do not remember but long for; Hiraeth, the Welsh call it.

I think I must have subconsciously searched for this place upon my return to the Jamaican landscape of my foremothers in 2017. The scene became familiar and in the photographs that I took, I felt the search of the home of my ancestors, I had imagined from Millais, Dew-Drenched Furze . The stories my mother told me of the times she was here and the stories she was told came alive in these images. The painting was my portal to a world that lay beyond, and through it, I was able to construct confirmation of that which I belonged to and had always yearned for, photographic proof of my ancestral home.

In my photographic image, my mother took my place and stood in awe admiring the home she was able to find and return to – her ancestral home.

References Morrison, 1995, Site of Memory, in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 2d ed., ed. William Zinsser (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), pp.83-102.

Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Solar Arkestra, (1974), Space Is the Place. New York Plexifilm, 2003. t

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The Mothers (Fantasm) (1 drawing of 12), (2020/2021) Pastel drawings on paper 29.7cm x 42 cm 53

INTRODUCTION

Cover image: Maybelle Peters The Morning Has Gold In Its Mouth (2020) Copyright © Maybelle Peters 2021 Courtesy of the artist Supported by Arts Council of England London Community Foundation for CPD Sessions.

The launch of the WoC Art Award has been made possible by the provision of a generous donation made by one of our local supporters who wishes to remain anonymous.

198 CAL and the curator would like to thank all the participating artists, as well as: BARBY ASANTE CLAUDETTE JOHNSON EVA LANGRET REHANA ZAMAN

198 Contemporary Arts & Learning 198 Railton Rd, London, SE24 0JT Gallery opening times: Monday - Friday 11am - 5pm Free Entry For weekend opening times and events, please visit 198.org.uk Tel: 020 7978 8309 Email: info@198.org.uk Web: www.198.org.uk Instagram: @198_cal Twitter: @198CAL Facebook: @198CAL 198 CAL Registered charity No. 801614

BROCKWELL ART SERVICES

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