The Thin Black Line and the Broad White One.

I went to a talk between Lubaina Himid and Paul Goodwin at the Whitechapel Gallery last week. They discussed three exhibitions she had worked with in the 1980s: Five Black Women at the Africa Centre (1983), Black Women Time Now at Battersea Arts Centre (1983-4) and The Thin Black Line at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (1985). It was illuminating and more than a little depressing. One thing that got wedged in my head was how the exhibition at the ICA, deeply symbolic in a conduit between the big art stuff (ironically very small artworks by Richard Tuttle) and the …

Black Portraits II Revisited NYC Feb 2016

Last year I wrote about seeing the Lynette Yadiom Boakye exhibition, Voices After Dark at the Serpentine Gallery and the huge effect it had on me. My responses to the exhibition had been the cause of a small spat between me and another associate at Open School East because I found it really difficult to explain what it is like to be in my skin, with my experiences to stand in a gallery surrounded by unglossed images of black people. The spat was interesting because the conversation rapidly shifted from being about me and my experience to being about him not …

11 Minutes

This is the title of a novel by Paul Coelho. In this novel he writes about a prostitute who learns about the sacred nature of sex and meets an English man who introduces her to the delights of sado masochism. It’s always the English who do that. I haven’t read it and I’m not going to. I have only ever tried to read one of his books and I didn’t get through it. He’s one of those writers that you get recommended especially after a particularly bruising breakup. It’s all very spiritual. Bleakly depressing. I’m a member of the Haters …

OSE

Performance 14 November 2015 My work has recently been around the subject owning the image and dictating what the camera shows, the performance was a way to include other people in the process, so I got my audience to turn on their torches on their cameras make their mark on the film.

Cue Credits

The show is up at Open School East, there is only one more full day to go, then it comes down and that’s that, I’m done with artschool, in a less ignominious manner than in 1980, but just as done. I’m tired, I have been feeling sick for a couple of weeks and I have had a headache since September. Apart from that, actually no, there is no apart from that. Have a song from the 1970s that isn’t related really , but it is kind of cute and a mighty fine performance from Johnny Mathis and Denice Williams.

Estonia Residency: Wooden Blocks

Found blocks of oak 5x4cm, primed, with instant film lifts

Oh look, squirrel

This past two and a half months I have been mostly thinking which is a nice way of saying having ideas and doing absolutely nothing with them. This is a problem because I have a hell of a lot of things to do in a relatively short space of time, I have deadlines. Douglas Adams used to say something about loving deadlines and the wooshing sound they made as they went past. I envy that, I cannot be so sanguine about a deadline even one like: that’s a nice idea, write it down in the next 10 minutes or you …

Separations

The 1976 edition of the Penguin Book of Love Poetry is divided into sections: imitations, declarations, persuasions, celebrations, separations and desolations. The section with the poems I like the most is separations. There is something intrinsically interesting about looking at things being pulled apart. I like these poems that put into words the maelstrom of dejection where everything glitters with loss. Where the writer examines what was through the lens of what is gone. There is something very satisfying about pulling something apart and restructuring it.

Residency in Estonia: Little Books

The printing museum makes boxes out of old book covers, there were lots of them around so I used them as frames for cyanotypes that were made either from direct sun printing or contact printing from negatives. [envira-gallery id=”3016″]

60 Minutes with my Mother

Ritual is important. The breakfast ritual doubly so, another night survived, another morning washed and dressed, make up on and ready to eat, ready for the rest of the day.