CRAFTED SELVES
The Unfinished Conversation
CRAFTED SELVES
The Unfinished Conversation
Dual Identity explored through the work of thirteen contemporary Scottish artists
ARTISTS
Adil Iqbal
Alberta Whittle
Ashanti Harris
Eden Dodd
Emelia Kerr Beale
Harvey Dimond
Joy Baek
Li Huang
Rae-Yen Song
Sara Pakdel-Cherry
Sekai Machache
Tilda Williams-Kelly
Viv Lee
CURATOR
Cat Dunn
Foreword
Introduction
The Artists
Adil Iqbal
Alberta Whittle
Ashanti Harris
Eden Dodd
Emelia Kerr Beale
Harvey Dimond
Joy Baek
Li Huang
Rae-Yen Song
Sara Pakdel-Cherry
Sekai Machache
Tilda Williams-Kelly
Viv
Foreword
In recent years, conversations about personal and cultural identity have become a bigger part of our national and social conversation. It should be no surprise then, that expressions of personal identity and cultural history have also become a growing concern in the work of many contemporary artists. It is also gratifying to see the work of these artists gaining greater recognition. This felt like an appropriate moment therefore, to create an exhibition exploring the many ways in which craft and identity intersect in the work of contemporary Scottish artists.
It is also notable that when many artists consider cultural identity, they think in depth about the materials they are using; looking to craft materials, cultural methodologies, or histories of art, to explore their personal selves or shared histories. It was important to Fife Contemporary to make sure that we worked with a curator for whom identity is pivotal to their practice and research, and who would be immersed in the work of artists who are at the centre of this conversation. By commissioning Cat Dunn, we knew we were working with someone who directly understood how identity can impact the work of marginalised groups, both through research and lived experience.
Fife Contemporary are delighted to present Crafted Selves. We have learned a lot from the conversations this exhibition has started; its subheading acknowledging that this goal of understanding each other more remains ongoing. Considering the highly personal themes the topic of this exhibition explores, it is possible to see once again the high value that visual art, craft, and making have for allowing us to explore painful and challenging topics through creativity. I remain deeply moved by how many artists in this exhibition chose tightly crafted and thought-filled methodologies to help them express a personal connection to challenging cultural experiences with clarity and precision. In so doing they reclaim the narrative, turning this into moments of pride and joy in which we can all share.
Kate Grenyer Director Fife Contemporary 2023
Introduction
This exhibition features thirteen artists living and working in Scotland, featuring many craft and visual artworks, from ceramics to textiles, paintings, and installation elements.
These artists experience and live with dual identities. At least part of their identity is ‘othered’ - made to feel different or marginalised from parts of society because of their race, gender, disability or other cultural experience. They express this experience through their work and find a way to reclaim and feel pride in the excluded part of their culture and identity.
The artists involved in this exhibition are Ashanti Harris, Sara Pakdel-Cherry, Eden Dodd, Emelia Kerr Beale, Harvey Dimond, Sekai Machache, Viv Lee, Adil Iqbal, Joy Baek, Li Huang, Tilda Williams-Kelly, Rae-Yen Song and Alberta Whittle.
Dual Identity means navigating geographies imposed on you by others, whether real or imagined. It is others dictating whether you ‘belong’. It exists on the surface in multiple places but can never form deep and stable roots. Nevertheless, it also means having access to a multitude of cultures and the ability to feel comfortable and make meaningful relationships in an array of places across the world. Dual Identity can often be fraught with negative connotations, yet artists have used their lived experiences to create artworks with joy.
The research for this exhibition investigated how each artist dealt with the negative and positive connotations associated with having a Dual Identity and how this is shown through the lens of craft and visual art.
Crafted Selves : The Unfinished Conversation invites you, the audience, to become part of the conversation.
ADIL Iqbal
Adil Iqbal is a Scottish-Pakistani cultural practitioner with a Textile Design and Anthropology background. He utilises collaborative practice, narrative art, and digital media to bridge Western and indigenous cra cultures. Iqbal received the Dewar Art Award for his project ‘Twilling Tweeds,’ which connected Scottish and Chitrali cultures via weaving and hand embroidery. In addition, he has led art workshops exploring cultural similarities between Scotland and Pakistan, employing narrative discussions, life drawings, and digital art mediums.
With over a decade-long engagement with Chitral Valley cra communities, his work spans cultural heritage, sustainable design practices, community, and business development. His unique Scottish-Pakistani identity, professional expertise in textile design, and anthropological training allow him to foster cross-cultural dialogues. His passion lies in breaking down cultural barriers and celebrating the common threads connecting traditions.
Born and raised in Edinburgh, Adil Iqbal studied Textile Design at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh before working in the industry all over Europe. Building on his interdisciplinary background he successfully completed a Master’s degree in Anthropology, Art and Perception in 2016 from the University of St Andrews. Adil’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Royal Scottish Academy, Patrick Geddes Centre at Riddle’s Court, The Nomad Tent in Edinburgh, The Nomad Arts Gallery (Islamabad), An Lanntair (Stornoway), and Sheikh Abdullah Al Salem Culture Centre (Kuwait).
Adil Iqbal, Washroom Chapals (Slippers), detail 2012. Hand embroidery on Harris Tweed
This textile was cocreated between Chitrali embroiderer Halima Rehman and Adil Iqbal
Adil Iqbal, Weaving Songs, detail 2012
ALBERTA Whittle
As part of the Cra ed Selves exhibition, the Scottish premiere of Alberta Whittle’s film The Axe Forgets, but the Tree Remembers screens at The Byre Theatre, St Andrews on Wednesday 17 January, 2024. The film features the stories of the Windrush generation and their descendants. Weaving together the experiences of her own family, stories sourced from Hackney Archives and conversation with the borough’s Windrush residents, Whittle’s film highlights the animosity experienced by those who first migrated from the Caribbean to the UK.
Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle’s multifaceted practice is preoccupied with developing a personal response to the legacies of the Atlantic slave trade, unpicking its connections to institutional racism, white supremacy and climate emergency in the present. Against an oppressive political background Whittle aims to foreground hope and engage with different forms of resistance.
Whittle represented Scotland in the 59th Venice Biennale and is a 2022 recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Awards for Artists. In 2020, she was awarded a Turner Bursary and the Frieze Artist Award, she was the Margaret Tait Award winner for 2018/19.
Whittle presented a major solo exhibition at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One) in Edinburgh, 2023, and participated in the 14th Gwangju Biennale.
Alberta Whittle, The Axe Forgets, but the Tree Remembers, 2022 (film still) © Alberta Whittle. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage. Courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow 2023. Part of the Hackney Windrush Public Programme, 2022, curated by Create London in partnership with Hackney Council, with support from Freelands Foundation
Ashanti Harris, Emi Ori Cse in Copper, 2019, Photo by Matthew Arthur Williams. Copper mesh, thread, sequin trim
Exploring particularly the West African and Caribbean diaspora, each mask in this work is made using techniques learnt from Caribbean Carnival culture
ASHANTI Harris
Ashanti Harris is a multi-disciplinary artist, researcher and lecturer. Working with performance, facilitation, sound and moving image, installation and writing, Ashanti’s work disrupts historical narratives and reimagines them from a Caribbean diasporic perspective. Ashanti originally trained in sculpture and so engaging with materials and physical making processes is an important part of her work. Alongside this, she is drawn to the expanded ways an artwork can be experienced and this has led her to working with performance, movement and dance as elements within her multi-disciplinary art practice. She works with both sculpture and performance as processes which embody cultures, ancestral legacies and human lived experience through the physical act of making. The works presented in this exhibition are part of a wider body of work which honours and remembers ancestral histories.
Recent commissions and exhibitions include Jerwood Staging Series 2022, Jerwood Arts, London (2022); Dancing a Peripheral Quadrille, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Edinburgh (2022); An Exercise in Exorcism, GoMA, Glasgow (2021); Opening Night, Timehri Film Festival, Georgetown (2021), JUMBIES, Glasgow International, Glasgow (2021); This Woman’s Work, Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami (2021); Miraculous Noise, Viborg Kunsthal, Viborg (2021); OHCE, Radiophrenia, 87.9fm (2020); Being Present, OGR, Torino (2020); In The Open, The Common Guild, Glasgow (2020).
Eden Dodd, Conversations with my Father, detail 2021. Photo by Noemi Georghita. Handmade mirror, combi boiler, dried flowers
In this piece Dodd uses tragedy, darkness and loss as inspiration, through family conversations about Identity
EDEN
Dodd
Eden Dodd, Conversations with my Father, 2021. Photo by Noemi Georghita
Eden Dodd is a transfeminine artist living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. Her practice focuses on the concept of ‘fractured states’; the space between planes of existence, of dichotomies and of the physical and ethereal states. Dualities, reflections, and doubles are integral to the language used to describe these states. The concepts of her work focus on personal demons, the transfeminine experience, and personal mythologies and narratives acting as ‘lenses’ of self-analysis and actualisation. Her ongoing re-calibration of her identity is expressed through its connectivity to the androgynous nature of deities and mythological beings - wells from which she channels her power as a transfeminine person.
She has exhibited solo and as part of group exhibitions nationally and internationally, with a multidisciplinary practice focused predominantly within a form of sculpture that ‘blurs the lines between dimensions or states of being’ as well as art disciplines.
Dodd has recently finished studying her Master of Letters in Fine Art Practice (Sculpture) at Glasgow School of Art in 2021. Selected projects include Kunst I’m Nomad, Basel, Switzerland (2022); Severance, Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh (2022); Death Throes at the University of Connecticut Art Galleries, Connecticut and SPRING/BREAK, New York, USA (2021); Plan B, SALT space Gallery, Glasgow (2021); Cwn Annwn, Cardiff Made, Cardiff (2020).
Beale, trust for support
This installation considers how imagination and repetition can be feminist coping mechanisms for disabilities
EMELIA Kerr Beale
Emelia Kerr Beale is a Glasgow-based artist. They work across drawing, sculpture and textile to process the complexities of illness holding discrepancies and contradictions together in tension, creating moments where discomfort, pleasure, anxiety, or joy may coexist and interact. Using motifs and text, they consider the ways in which imagination and repetition can be coping mechanisms. Kerr Beale o en uses motifs, symbols and metaphors as methods of thinking about bodies without depicting bodies themselves. Their practice pushes for more expansive understandings of illness that reject neat categorisations and binaries. Kerr Beale’s research is rooted in queer theory and feminist disability studies, as well as lived and embodied experience. Kerr Beale’s most recent works use a speculative history of an oak tree as a metaphor for the systematic disregard for the self-advocacy of disabled and chronically ill people, through an installation of machine-knitted garments, video and print work.
Kerr Beale graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2019. Recent exhibitions and projects include Platform, French Institute, Edinburgh, (2022); Tonic Arts Life Under Lockdown commission for Western General Hospital in Edinburgh (2020); Bathing Nervous Limbs, Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh (2021); as if looking is knowing, Nomas* Projects, Dundee (2021); and Disability Arts Online and Attenborough Arts Centre visual artist support commission (2021). Recent residencies include The Bothy Project, Isle of Eigg (2019); The Royal Drawing School Artist Studios, Dumfries House, Cumnock (2019 and 2021); and Hospitalfield’s Graduate Programme, Arbroath (2021-2022).
Emelia Kerr
, 2022. Photo by Sally Jubb Photography. Machineknitted sculptural installation, wool and metal
Harvey Dimond, 2023
HARVEY Dimond
For Cra ed Selves: The Unfinished Conversation Harvey Dimond has created written responses for two artists, Ashanti Harris and Rae-Yen Song. The pieces A Masquerade of Apparitions and Ancestral Constellations are included as an insert within the exhibition catalogue, and are available online at fcac.co.uk.
Harvey Dimond is a British-Barbadian writer, artist and curator based between South Africa and Scotland. Their multi-disciplinary practice examines queer ecologies and the entangled histories and trajectories of the climate crisis and anti-Blackness across the realm of the Atlantic.
“Dual Identity, to me, means navigating geographies that are imposed on you by others, whether real or imagined. It’s others dictating whether or not you ‘belong’. It’s existing, on the surface, in multiple places but never being able to form deep and stable roots. But it also means access to a multitude of cultures, and an ability to feel comfortable and make meaningful relationships in an array of places across the world.”
Harvey Dimond’s solo exhibition so many keen and subtle masters, was recently shown at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh (2023), and recent commissions include Edinburgh Art Festival (2022), Art Walk Porty (2022) and CCA Glasgow (2021).
Joy Baek, Nothing Edible, Everything Sensible: How I Recognized Her Waiting_1, detail 2022. Stoneware ceramic, gelatine, wire, plaster
These ceramics use the imagery of the symbolic flower, Pulsatilla Koreana (the so-called Grandmother flower), from Korean folklore to highlight the sacrifice and unconditional love of family
JOY
Baek
Joy Baek, Nothing Edible, Everything Sensible: How I Recognized Her Waiting_1, 2022
Joy Baek is a Korean artist based in Glasgow. Adopting a multidisciplinary practice, Baek explores art as a line of dialogues which record the history of our times. Addressing the socio-cultural issues in Korean and Scottish society, Baek’s work embodies both public and private interpretations of women’s lives. Her desire to render silenced voices heard has led her to develop an activist ethos that strives to sustain the action of elevating these voices, as demonstrated in her long-term series of work. Having graduated with a Fine Art (BA) from the Chelsea College of Arts in London, Baek has since graduated from the MFA at the Glasgow School of Art.
Baek’s performance works were featured in Tramway TV by Tramway, Glasgow, and were recently selected to be on display in Citizen M, Glasgow. Since her graduation, she has been actively working and presenting her works in London and Glasgow, including Through the Crowd at 10 Greatorex Street in London, (2022) and Love and Legacy: Our Grandmothers at French Street Studio and Gallery in Glasgow, (2022). Baek is a recipient of the Gilbert Bayes Grant in 2022 and was chosen for the residency programme at Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, for 2023.
Li Huang’s beautifully cra ed paintings explore the past, the present and the impasse from a different cultural perspective
LI Huang
Li Huang researches the spiritual dimensions of portraiture painting through his work. The subjects of his work are reminiscences of his father, who has been in the other world for a long time. Through his paintings, Huang tries to explore the relationship between the natural and the supernatural, and the imprint of traditional culture that exists in people’s life and how it flows continuously through generation to generation. Huang pays particular attention to the attitude to death from the perspective of traditional Chinese philosophy, religions and folk customs, explored through a Western cultural perspective. He is continually grappling with the challenge of manging the impact of these dual cultures, balancing ideas of seen and unseen in his paintings and portraying a story rather than an instant moment.
Li Huang has a BA in Fine Art and MFA Art and Humanities from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee. Huang was selected for the 2021, 2020, 2019 and 2018 Scottish Portrait Awards Exhibitions.
Li Huang, Sacred, 2020. Oil on canvas
Rae-Yen Song, ⦿yap⦿, 2021. Photo by Ruth Clark. Silk, cotton, faux fur, polyester, imitation rice beads, papier-mâché
By using fantasy and storytelling, this installation explores Dual Identity from a nonhuman perspective
RAE-YEN Song
Rae-Yen Song is a visual artist that works expansively across mediums, including drawing, sculpture, installation, costume, video, sound, performance, and family collaboration. Song’s work explores selfmythologising as a survival tactic: using fabulation to establish a richly visual world-building practice informed by autobiography, ancestral journeys, Taoist philosophy, family ritual, multi-species interdependency, and science fiction. For Song, world-building becomes a tool for imaginative self-definition, with familial logics becoming the foundations of an alternative reality untethered from linear conceptions of space and time. It allows Song to resist colonial tropes and conventions, cra ing multidimensional personal records and offerings towards radically different futures. These narratives yield a mix of humour, empathy and absurdity, whilst speaking broadly and politically about foreignness, identity, survival and what it means to belong - or not.
Recent exhibitions and projects include: ☰pa●○pa☴, Aspex, Portsmouth (2023); Let the Song Hold Us, FACT Liverpool (2022); Meet me at the threshold, Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh (2022); Aggregate 2022, Freelands Foundation, London (2022); WORMB, Quench Gallery, Margate (2022); ▷▥⦿▻, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee (2021). Other selected projects include: wūûūwūûū, a LUX Scotland moving image commission for BBC Scotland (2021); Fabric of Society, Glasgow International (2021); songdynasty. life, a nascent online archive, with videos commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival and Hunterian Art Gallery (2020 - ongoing).
Sara Pakdel-Cherry, Siah 1 and 2, 2022. Photo by
These textile hangings are designed to highlight the political plight of women in Iran under an Islamic regime and Persian heritage
SARA Pakdel-Cherry
Sara Pakdel-Cherry is a graduate of Fine Art from Duncan of Jordanston College of Art and Design. An Iranian-Scottish multimedia artist and activist, Pakdel-Cherry explores the consolidation of the Islamic regime a er the 1979 revolution while enhancing knowledge of her Persian heritage. Her art practice is based on her experiences as a Persian woman with hopes of educating the public of these issues. Meanwhile, illuminating the powerful feminine heritage of ancient Persia for the women of all generations in Iran.
“Identity is kind of like Russian Roulette at birth.
Personally, I was born as a Muslim Iranian national. Three years later my parents became immigrants and therefore asylum seekers in the UK. Years later my family became British citizens, granting us with Dual Identity. However, as a woman of colour, the term Dual Identity has negative connotations for me, this o en can be the case for many people. If you are of colour and have Dual Identity you have most likely have felt, faced, and dealt with racism. Dual Identity can at times be oppressive.
I am Sara Pakdel-Cherry, a multimedia artist with a practice based on women’s rights in Iran. I am a woman whose identity is stripped upon every visit back home, just like every woman currently residing in Iran.”
Pakdel-Cherry has been selected for RSA New Contemporaries in 2024.
Sara Pakdel-Cherry with assistance from Kirsten Farquhar. Printed textile
This work is an investigation of the relationship between spirituality, imagination. She uses indigo in the textile featured in her work, challenging both the colonial history and allure of indigo and the dye processes used in the east and the global south
SEKAI Machache
Sekai Machache (she/her) is a Zimbabwean-Scottish visual artist and curator based in Glasgow, Scotland. Her work is a deep interrogation of the notion of self. She is interested in the relationship between spirituality, imagination, and the role of the artist in disseminating symbolic imagery to provide a space for healing. Machache works with a wide range of media including photography. Her photographic practice is formulated through digital studio-based compositions utilising body paint and muted lighting to create images that appear to emerge from darkness.
Sekai Machache is the recipient of the 2020 RSA Morton Award and is an artist in residence with the Talbot Rice Residency Programme 2021-2023. Recent exhibitions include Svikiro, Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute (2023); Body of Land: Ritual Manifestations, Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow International Festival (2021).
Sekai Machache, The Divine Sky: Deep Divine Sky III, detail 2021. Photo by Antanas Budvytis. Photographic print on foamboard
Williams-Kelly,
These artworks make space for Black women as subjects, the artist uses the black diaspora community as sources of inspiration and strength
TILDA Williams-Kelly
Tilda Williams-Kelly (she/her) is a Scottish visual artist based between Alloa and Glasgow. Her practice involves portrait and figurative oil painting, open to myriad avenues of expression, producing vibrant and impactful images that explore themes of colour, light, environment, and humanity. This humanity begins with the self; what began as a reckoning with the notion that only men can paint, has morphed into an inner search of her own Trinidadian and Irish lineage, and the role of Scottish colonialism as a Scottish artist with this lineage. The focus of Williams-Kelly’s work is to convey the necessity in upli ing one another; she looks to community as sources of inspiration and strength. Pursuits are based in community arts activism, collaboration, and research within socio-political settings such as anti-racism, intersectional feminism, and climate justice. She blends classical oil techniques with contemporary style in both reference and countering with the oil ‘masters’ that first inspired her to pursue an oil portrait practice. In so doing, Williams-Kelly takes this classical method and manipulates it to speak to us in the present; merging their methods with spray painting, mark making, abstraction and imagination -her way of expressing blackness and joy. She skillfully engages storytelling and mythos to address histories of erasure and subjugation o en visited on Black bodies. In opposition to this, she chooses to represent the Black figure in compositions that evoke a sense of liberation and inner strength.
Recent exhibitions include Marcelle, Dunoon Burgh Hall, Dunoon (2023) and The Graduates – A Bold Beginning at Tatha Gallery, Newport on Tay (2022).
Tilda
Courage Plays at Night, detail 2023. Oil on canvas
Tilda Williams-Kelly, Courage Plays at Night, 2023
Each ceramic is influenced by prehistoric cultures and modernist forms. She works with wild Scottish clay harnessing the elemental beauty of her adopted homeland
VIV Lee
Viv Lee was born in Hong Kong and studied at Glasgow School of Art. A er graduating, she remained in Glasgow and is still based there today, creating ceramics inspired by the beautiful irregularity of nature. Rather than seeking perfect symmetry in her work, Lee looks to organic forms – particularly the human body – and embraces the imperfect. Lee creates unique, one-off, sculptural ceramics by hand in Glasgow. Mindfully made, each piece is a unique work of art, which also serves a functional purpose.
Lee’s work is held in private and corporate collections in Scotland, England, USA, Denmark, Vienna, Germany, France, Italy, Lithuania, Canada, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Dubai and Australia. Selected group shows include BARRO,Materia Materia, Mexico (2022); Claylarks,The New Cra smen, London (2022); An Act of Making,M.A.H Yorkton Studios, London (2021); Cra Scotland Selects,The Scottish Gallery,Edinburgh (2020); VESSEL, Custom Lane, Edinburgh (2019); TERRA,The Briggait, Glasgow (2019).
Viv Lee, Sympoiesis Works, 2022-23. Stoneware
The Unfinished Conversation Cat Dunn
Crafted Selves: The Unfinished Conversation is a multi-layered, dynamic, mixed group exhibition held at St Andrews Museum and Kirkcaldy Galleries in 2023 and 2024. The show consists of the work of 13 artists, with artworks ranging in genre from paintings to installations, from ceramics to mirror work to textiles, from written pieces to moving image films. The artists range from experienced to early career, all incredibly talented.
The title is from the continuing discourse with the artists; what does it mean to have a Dual Identity, and how is this sense of self-reflection in work being made by Scottish craft artists today? With the artists based throughout Scotland, contemporary Scottish Identity will inevitably be a part of the conversation. From lived experiences and histories that are experienced as pain and anger, the process of making and creating can express this pain but also bring a sensation and expression of joy and celebration in claiming Dual Identity.
Craft is often seen as an activity, pursuit or occupation involving making things by hand.1 Historically, it is an action which requires a particular set of skills and knowledge of skilled work and is usually applied to people occupied in small-scale production of goods. Designing, creating, and hand-making a crafted object connects the maker profoundly and personally to that object. Each of the artists taking part in the exhibition uses layered and complex elements of craft to create compositions that offer a unique iconography and hybridisation of references. Elements of historical and contemporary diverse cultures merge and create anthropological and dreamlike spaces outside of the geographic location, through which an artist can question the generational and geographical codes that create their identity.
Each artist balances their different genealogical cultures, which is sometimes a struggle. Nevertheless, they seamlessly mesh when these elements come together in their artwork.
Having more than one home and a hybrid point of origin is no longer unusual. Social Identity shifts into a more nebulous network of geographical and geopolitical locations, feelings, memories, and oral histories in our increasingly globalised world.
Art does not have to be constrained to one medium. In the same way, artists can embrace their multiple cultures and identities. For example, Crafted Selves allow the artists to explore their identity through self-portraits and symbolism in works of art that relate to ancestry or culture. Crafting and art objects intersect all cultural domains: economic, social, political, and ritual. Craft goods are social objects that assume importance beyond household maintenance and reproduction. They signify and legitimise group membership and social roles and become reserves of wealth, storing intrinsically valuable materials and the labour invested in their manufacture. Specialised craft producers (artists) are involved in creating and maintaining social networks, wealth, and social legitimacy. Artisans and consumers must accept, create, or negotiate the social legitimacy of production and the conditions of production and distribution, usually defined in terms of Social Identity. The nature of that process defines the production organisation and the social relations that characterise the relationships between producers and consumers.
Without attention to artisan identity, our reconstructions of production systems and explanations for their form and dynamics are destined to be unidimensional and unidirectional, lacking in vital elements of social process and behaviour. Art can be seen as a stimulus for social transformation and political change. Identity in modern
art is a broad and exciting theme, allowing viewers to gain new perspectives and understand other people’s lives. For the artists who draw inspiration from their identity, the work becomes a podium for exploration, expression, and connection.
Social Identity is the way we perceive and express ourselves. Factors and conditions an individual are born with — such as ethnic heritage, sex, or body — often define one’s identity. However, many aspects of a person’s identity change throughout life. For example, people’s experiences can alter how they see themselves or others perceive them. Conversely, their identities also influence their decisions: individuals choose their friends, adopt specific fashions, and align themselves with political beliefs based on their identities. Many artists use their work to express, explore, and question ideas about identity.
Of course, everyone has, in a way, multiple identities - you can be a wife, daughter, mother, sister, son, husband, uncle and so on. It is what the world sees and where society places you at a particular moment. Some individuals’ physical, social, and mental characteristics can define Social Identity. For example, social identities include race or ethnicity, gender, social class and socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, (dis) abilities, and religious beliefs. Dual Identity is defined as identification with both one’s ethnocultural minority in-group and one’s society of residence. 2 This class of identity recognises subgroups’ differences and creates an overarching category. For example, group members can conceive two distinctive groups (e.g., White, and Black) within a superordinate (i.e., American) social identity.3
Even if the term Dual Identity is a specific term related to ethnocultural background - we are exploring other dualities as well; and, as such within the exhibition there are artists who are transgendered and artists who define their disability as an identity.
We currently stand in a moment where Britain goes back and forth, arguing about immigrants and people of colour’s role in the identity of Britain. Yet, I feel that as a result, Britain can become a place of togetherness through shared histories.
Scotland itself is undergoing a cultural shift as it repositions itself in the wider world, with Scottish art at the centre of the current discourse about Scottish social identity. For example, in 2022, Scotland was represented at the Venice Biennale by Alberta Whittle, the first black woman artist who openly claims to have a Dual Identitybelonging to both Barbados and Scotland equally.4
Art and craft can express aspirations, values, and national character.
Cat Dunn - 2023
An expanded version of this essay can be found at www.fcac.co.uk
1 Ratten, V., 2022. Defining craft making. In Entrepreneurship in Creative Crafts (pp. 29-38). Routledge.
2 Platt, L., 2016. Is there assimilation in minority groups’ national, ethnic and religious identity?. In Migrants and Their Children in Britain (pp. 46-70). Routledge.
3 Schaafsma, J., Nezlek, J.B., Krejtz, I. and Safron, M., 2010. Ethnocultural identification and naturally occurring interethnic social interactions: Muslim minorities in Europe. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), pp.10101028.
4 Wendt, S., 2023. All the World’s Histories: At The 59th Venice Biennale. Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, 52(1), pp.120-135.
Conversations
In the lead up to the Cra ed Selves exhibition, curator Cat Dunn spoke to each of the exhibiting artists, inviting them to share their individual thoughts and ideas on Dual Identity in detail. An excerpt of this interview is played within the Cra ed Selves exhibition and is transcribed below, while the interview in full is available on Fife Contemporary’s website.
Cat Dunn: What are your thoughts on identity and Dual Identity? And then how does this play out in your own practice and your work?
Harvey Dimond: I think when thinking about Dual Identity, for me, I guess living between two different places and coming from two different cultures, that’s kind of, quite a substantial part of my practice.
Sekai Machache: I was the only black child in my high school and then again, in art school, for years. So when I went to art school I initially felt like arts was this space that I could utilise to, sort of like, do anything, say anything, create anything that sort of meant something to me.
And I felt like it was the only environment where I could express myself truly, you know, I would write a lot of poetry and I would paint and I would make music. And these were the only spaces where I could actually really, truly create this idea of who I am as a person. I started doing self-portraits and the self-portraits was like the first time that I really got to encounter myself, really truly on my own terms. And through that selfportraiture practice I was able to really look at my face; really look at the structure of it, really look at the colour and how to create that colour with paint, how it was very different from how I would approach painting a white person. I realised the differences were, they were real, they were tangible and accessible, but they weren’t actually, they didn’t really mean anything in terms of who I am as a person, because I was still just as Scottish as everyone else. I was still experiencing the same school system, the same, you know, the same country. I was still in Scotland and feeling very much like I was a part of the fabric of this place. And my relationship to Zimbabwe was really, really stunted, I guess, because I didn’t have access to my language. I would only go home very infrequently and I didn’t have a great relationship with people in my family, where I could just go there whenever I wanted and feel safe and comfortable in that environment, either. There was a hostility that I experienced when I was in Zimbabwe that felt harder to experience because everyone looked
like me. And yeah, so it was harder to be in Zimbabwe than it was to be in Scotland.
Tilda Williams-Kelly: I think what I’ve always felt, mostly in my life, is not enough of any one thing. Not Scottish enough, but not black enough. But not white enough. Not Irish enough, not Trinidadian enough. And I think all those things are diluted but all together, make up me and it’s taken me a long time to become proud of that.
Rae-Yen Song: For Dual Identity? Yeah, so I was born in Scotland and that is kind of the impetus of how I have been exploring identity and being Scottish, and then my parents are from Singapore, and having Chinese heritage, so there’s always been this, I guess, this push and pull, and feelings of belonging, or not belonging and whether that be positive or negative. I think I’m quite interested in the idea of not belonging as a positive, and as something that, I guess, taps into survival techniques or strategies. And looking at other kind of beings, other non-human species and how they can belong to a place or how they can survive and thrive in different, o en hostile environments, and kind of echoing that into what I do and what I research within my practice and how I want to explore it.
Ashanti Harris: I was born in Guyana and then moved to the UK when I was a kid. And being Guyanese has always been a really important part of my identity, especially when we moved to the UK because it was this sort of place that my family needed to keep alive for me, because it didn’t exist in my immediate surroundings. So the way that Guyana was kept alive was through food, it was kept alive through stories. It was also kept alive through art, and by art I mean going to see if there was any kind of exhibition about the Caribbean, we would go and see it and I would go to Afro-Caribbean dance classes. And I guess just all of these different ways that you can experience culture, whilst you’re in a different culture.
Joy Baek: Even though my research tends to, kind of, concentrate on the narratives of other community, or sometimes purely about materials, they all kind of stem from my identity, like as a Korean, as an East Asian woman living in the Western land, and a woman in, you know her 20s.
Viv Lee: I think it’s something that’s definitely more in my consciousness now and as I’m in my 40s. Growing up, I didn’t really give it too much thought, but I did know, I think reflecting back on it now, there was definitely a sense of disconnect, and feeling perhaps,
like I did not identify with any particular, you know, identity. Because having grown up in Hong Kong, a former British colony, I went to English speaking schools and I didn’t quite feel like I fitted in at school with the other kids, the other Western kids, and nor did I feel like I could fit in with Hong Kong-born Chinese kids. I just had this kind of mixed feeling and then when I moved overseas I found that that kind of feeling just never really left me. But I didn’t really know that, perhaps it was because of this dual experience that it’s led me to feel somehow not necessarily identifying with any particular culture or identity.
Sara Pakdel-Cherry: I guess if I wasn’t Iranian, I don’t know what I would make art by, or would I even make art? The Dual Identity comes out in everything I do, even I would say in my own practice. It’s one of those things where you’re just working in a simple part time job and the customer asks, ‘Where are you from?’ and then you’re like, do you mean ethnicity-wise, or do you mean the area of Glasgow? ‘Oh well both’. I know you want to know, where my skin color is from, that’s your actual real question. Sometimes it’s a compliment, sometimes there are reactions like ‘Oh, ok. Well, what are you doing here?’ And you’re like, well, I was raised here. ‘Ah, ok, ok, ok. Yeah, what brought you to sunny Scotland then?’ And you’re like, man, I am one of you. So if Dual Identity has, whether I want to like - I’m proud of who I am but it introduces itself before I introduce myself. Before I come forward with my own identity and the person I am and say who I am, they already know who I am from their assumption of me, from the way I look.
Adil Iqbal: Identity is really something that is constantly shifting. It’s evolving. There’s an evolutionary aspect to identity, even for me as a Scottish, but also Pakistani. You know, coming from the Pakistani heritage but being born in Edinburgh, I’ve always had a feeling that, you know, I belong to more than one place. And also then you know as an artist as you are on your journey to discover new crafts, new communities, there’s an evolutionary aspect to that. And so for me, identity, it’s never been stagnant, it’s a constant moving idea.
Eden Dodd: Identity is a kind of lens in which one experiences the world, kind of, around them. Not only is identity something, from which is in there, I guess, from like a spiritual or kind of like a mental sense, or emotional etcetera, the kind of inner space, but it’s also, I guess, who you are physically as well. That identity is something that is a kind of filter or lens in which you experience the world and the world kind of experiences you. I definitely think that there’s an aspect of, kind of, the outside and the inside blurring and kind of coming together through that, which I find really interesting. I think identity is very critical and important, to not only us as artists but also to anybody in the world.
And I think that a questioning, and an interrogation, and an educational and learning process in which one comes to understand their identity is very vital, I guess, to living a kind of good and very human life.
Emelia Kerr Beale: I’m interested in making work that embraces multiplicity, that doesn’t try to reconcile the discrepancies and contradictions of identity, you know, but holds them together in tension. And I’m always working within the political-relational model of disability, that sees disability as a set of questions rather than firm definitions. And I also work a lot with symbols and motifs when thinking about bodily experience, because I’m interested in decentering this notion of ‘The Body’. You know, there is no ‘The Body’ - that is an iteration of a very specific body. And through this decentering, I hope to make work that can not only communicate my experiences, but extend outwards and, you know, meaningfully engage people across multiple different experiences.
Alberta Whittle: Having that Dual Identity, you really almost experience identity as a constantly mutating embodiment, especially dependent on where you are geographically. So if I think about myself when I’m home, because I’m a light-skinned black woman and because my hair is natural, from the time I was small there was always this sense of, well this woman does not belong here. And also the spectacle of being in Barbados visibly with my parents, one parent who was black, one parent who was white, and at the time when I was growing up in the 80s/90s, you didn’t see very many people who were there with parents from different separate backgrounds. You would see many light-skinned people, but you wouldn’t actually see them being identified as a person of Dual Identity, so fulfilling a very specific identification of mix in this. And this was always a really tricky thing to navigate. It was always a really tricky thing to navigate because you were always this, spectacle.
Li Huang: The global trend, no any other country nowadays can just isolate from the others. There are always some kind of a cultural influences from each other. I’m quite happy to stay here being, or you can call me Chinese or you can, I’m quite happy if you can, if you could call me Scottish.
Acknowledgements
Published by Fife Contemporary, 2023
www.fcac.co.uk
Published to accompany the exhibition Cra ed Selves: The Unfinished Conversation first held at St Andrews Museum, 14 October 2023 – 24 February 2024 and Kirkcaldy Galleries 23 March – 12 May 2024.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied or transmitted in any form by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the written permission of the copyright owners and the publisher.
The authors and copyright holders have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Images courtesy of the artists unless otherwise stated.
Cover images support structures by Emelia Kerr Beale, There Has To Be Somewhere at Grand Union, detail 2023, photo by Patrick Dandy. Inside cover images Emelia Kerr Beale, trust for support, detail 2022, photo by Sally Jubb Photography. Full page images: Viv Lee, Sympoiesis Works, detail 2022-23, Adil Iqbal, Weaving Songs, detail 2012, Li Huang, Sacred, detail 2020.
Publication design by Kat Butler
Printed by Westport Print, St Andrews
Edition of 500
ISBN: 978-1-907346-10-1
The authors would like to thank all the artists involved in the exhibition, the staff of Fife Contemporary and the staff at OnFife at St Andrews Museum and Kirkcaldy Galleries.
ISBN: 978-1-907346-10-1
