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— Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book) (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2001), p. 61.
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Materials and Practices
Cheryl Finley
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1. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, (London: Virago, 1984). 2. Ingrid Pollard, ‘Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives’, Feminist Review, Autumn 1984, No. 17, p.115. 3. Eddie Chambers, Black Artists in British Art: A History Since the 1950s (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), p. 112 and The BLK Art Group Research Project, 2021, accessed 1 October 2021, http:// www.blkartgroup.info/conferencedoc.html http://www.blkartgroup.info/82conference.html
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‘History and technology are a delight to me.’ — Ingrid Pollard In February 1984, celebrated African American poet, dancer, activist and writer, Maya Angelou, travelled to London to promote the UK publication of her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Ingrid Pollard was there with other London-based Black creatives to take it all in.1 She brought her camera to document the historic evening, realising dramatic and engrossing black and white portraits of the 56-year-old artist activist energising the intimate gathering of local poets and supporters. Just three years following the devastating 1981 Brixton riots, communities of colour, including women and artists, banded together to demand their right and access to better education and housing, and inclusion in civic life, looking to history through the archive’s omissions to forge a brighter, more just and equitable future. Pollard absorbed Angelou’s worldly experiences, lessons and messages as material for her own artistic and scholarly practice as the fissures between Black and white feminism began to tear away any sense of solidarity that would advance the cause for all women. In her account of that evening for the Feminist Review, Pollard discusses Angelou’s autobiography and likened her wisdom to a clarion call for Black women in the UK, and throughout the global Black diaspora. ‘There are big differences between the politics of Black and white feminists. Black women cannot afford the luxury of separatism; Black people suffer the effects of racism… Maya Angelou stressed the importance of unity with our Black brothers and emphasised that the struggle cannot be won without a sense of the wider world struggle of Black people.’ 2 Angelou’s seasoned teachings, together with an increasing involvement in the burgeoning Black arts scene of the 1980s, influenced Pollard’s unique trajectory as an artist fascinated by history and technology, the environment and belonging, the archive and memory. Not only was Pollard present for Maya Angelou’s brief British encounter with Black feminist artists and poets in 1984, but she also previously attended the historic First National Black Art Convention organised by the BLK Art Group at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1982.3 Forward thinking in their agenda, the organisers called on ‘all Black artists and art students … to discuss the form, functioning, and future of Black art’. In these heady times
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Below and right: Self-Evident (1995) (details). Colour light box 50.8 x 50.8 cm and Silver Gelatin prints each 152.4 x 50.8 cm
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III The figures emerge like apparitions in the landscape. But these are not ghosts. They are luminous, technicolour, chromogenic, flesh and blood people. They inhabit anonymous landscapes – a coppice wood, agricultural land, a pebbled beach, a bluebell wood – and carry an array of props: a cut watermelon, the Financial Times, a conch shell, a sceptre and orb, a carton of fried chicken, a carved bow; a cast of characters in a film whose narrative remains obscure. Yellow, red, green, white, blue, brown, white. The colours are dazzling like a hot English summer day which carries with it memories of far-away, tropical islands, of what Achille Mbembe calls ‘necrolandscapes’ – slave plantation islands where colonial violence ravages human lives and decimates the landscape, razing trees and forests to the ground. They remind me of Gainsborough’s paintings of a nascent English middle class projecting themselves onto constructed landscapes in their longing to naturalise their relationship to an invented English pastoral idyll. As if they had always been there. As if their wealth was not tainted with the stain of the African slave trade. The figures stand in the landscape, their eyes closed or looking out away from us into the middle distance, harbouring no such illusions. Facing the chromatic people is a black and white crew of young children, standing tall, observing the people opposite. Aged between six and ten years old, they are comfortable in their silver-gelatined skin: a girl, sock-footed balancing a pine cone on her head; a boy, hands in the pockets of his jeans, a camera around his neck and his head tipped slightly to one side quizzically; another girl, twisted locks of hair falling onto her face, dress down to her ankles, arms at her sides, she fixes us with her gaze. They are self-evidently here to stay.
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The Valentine Days #1 “Negro Girls, J.V.13994” (1891/2017) Hand-tinted print on hand-tinted photographs on Hahnemühle Bamboo Warm Tone Fine Art Print Image size: 80 x 64 cm Paper size: 90 x 76 cm
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I imagine the artist leaning over the photographic prints that are The Valentine Days (2017), undertaking the arduous labour of tinting each one by hand. An act of solidarity with the Victorian women who leant over stacks of black and white photographic postcards for hours, in dim candlelight, meticulously adding colour to make the images appear more realistic. The art of photography in all its forms – photographs, lantern slides and stereocards – was mobilised by the Scottish Valentine Brothers to promote the attractions of Jamaica – the working people, the housing and road systems, the telegraph wires – and to tempt prospective settlers and developers to this Caribbean island which they portrayed as picturesque and bountiful. As she hand-tints the photographs, the artist seeks out the ‘escapees’, the black figures who are not the focus of the camera but can be glimpsed on the fringes of the action: the mysterious faces looking out of the window, those positioned just on the edge of the frame slightly out of focus, the tiny figures in the distance looking back at the photographer, taking part in the moment in their own way. By adding colour to the past, the artist reclaims a cast of nineteenth-century black Jamaicans, restoring their technicolour dignity: two figures in the distance, drifting past on the water on a makeshift raft; two women posing on the steps of a house, one with her hand on her hip, carrying a weaved shopping basket, her gaze directed at us; the other sitting languorously on the steps, looking away from the camera, her ribboned straw hat in her hand. Made thirty years after her iconic series Pastoral Interlude (1987), Ingrid Pollard’s Valentine Days stretch back to the past in more ways than one. In Pastoral Interlude, the artist constructed her own hand-tinted travel photographs, picturing a solitary black female figure exploring the English countryside… it’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment. I thought I liked the Lake District where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease, dread... feeling I don’t belong. Walks through leafy glades with a baseball bat at my side.
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