The work contains over a hundred hand-gathered stones, which have been individually painted as a group action to confuse the mineral, the animal and the human.
These flints are suspended on a structure that can be understood as an abstraction of the British Empire. Encountering it can give a visual for thinking aloud about Empire.
The accompanying film is framed by the narration of some of the first forms of life in England.
It traces their epic journey from life in the sea to being fossilised and mined for weaponry, an act which created the first industrial disease (lung disease). amongst working-class white men.
The flints were used to create property out of land, cutting common white people from their land across Britain, creating servitude and often hunger.
Finally, they are used to fire guns across the British Empire to remove people in many other countries from their lives and land.
Bringing all these species and peoples together creates a kind of quantum identity. That identity is not only of subjugation and attempted erasure but also one of lives living with the land in community and reciprocity.
The artist picked up the flint because she identified with its black core, which was galactic, otherworldly, and in a different time frame but also part of the contemporary landscape around her. Its prevalence and seemingly endless presence in the soil echoed multiple uncountable losses related to British history and contemporary life.
Barrett started painting the flint brown like herself and her family members. Over three years, her artistic research deepened, and her work grew.
At the diaspora pavilion, she works with groups facilitating workshops to enable space to think about ancestors who have passed in unmarked ways in unmarked places through Flint. We paint flint and reflect in a supported way. The work grows with multiple authors and contains multiple histories and interpretations.
Making is thinking, I want to share spaces of making so more people have the private of extended thought that artists have,
Many makers have many thoughts while painting the flints the colour of their ancestors; all are valid and hold for this work.
For me, whilst making it, I thought about how this is a model of Empire. The frame is divisive and sectioning it is constructing separate spaces and categories. The frame slots into itself with no obvious fastenings, it can not be undone a little bit the whole thing needs to be upended, a massive undertaking. Even on its side, the structure may hold true. The frame is the same wherever you go but the top is local. In this case, as the top is built in the UK, it is a ubiquitous material here, 2 by 4's in fast-growing pine. If this were to be built in the Caribbean it would have a different roof out of a local material. All legs have a foot apart from one and this is supposed to be the root. Empire is positioned as organic and natural, but there is no organic root. The top is also the weakest point assembled fast and haphazardly without a real understanding of the material. I think these are the spaces to undermine empire.
