Conversations

In the lead up to the Crafted 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 Crafted 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 self portraiture 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, often 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.