This chair was given to me by Khadijah Ibrahim a spoken word poet that hosted me in Chapeltown Leeds. She had established herself as a poet and had also worked many years to enable the poetry of others in Chapeltown.
I opened the chair up in her home and discovered mouths. I have worked with so many chairs before and never found mouths. I knew the chairs wanted to tell of themselves. Chair articulating chair. I spent a lot of time making this work in my head as I did not have anywhere to make it. I took the chair apart and travelled with it in a suitcase to Germany. When I finally got to put the work together, it was in my Mother’s bedroom. The build happened quickly. I wondered at the validity of the order because of the speed of the construction. As the work kept getting damaged, because the room had to be used, I realised that I always knew exactly where each bit had to return to each piece had a space. The work has a “grammar” certain things had to come first others later on.
I knew it was a difficult conversation that was being had.
This work looks at the effort required to articulate yourself as an objectified individual.
It looks at how such an articulation is tenuous and how if your speech is claimed from “noise” it can fall back into the realm on “non-speech” quickly.
How what is reclaimed from objectification can fall back into the object state easily, the works hang from fragile threads. The threads to hang the works were harvested from the chairs. I did this at the laundrette, during children parties, and whilst cooking for several days.
Each part of the conversation is drawn from speech acts, gendered, raced. Speech acts of omission, parentheses, aggression, defence. Speech that is making and undoing connections. Speech that filters speech and also non-speech. What is unsaid takes up space in the sculpture. There is an invitation to “read between the lines “ for some of the work.
I often think it is a wonder anyone understands anyone else. Meanings from different sides, through different filters, look so unlike. The viewer can stand as one speaker and then the other and then as an observer of both and see a huge difference.
This work looks at the effort required to articulate yourself as an objectified individual.
It looks at how such an articulation is tenuous and how if your speech is claimed from “noise” it can fall back into the realm on “non-speech” quickly.
How what is reclaimed from objectification can fall back into the object state easily, the works hang from fragile threads. The threads to hang the works were harvested from the chairs. I did
This work is an attempt to quantify speech to show it's multitudes of interpretations, its weight and physicality in the room. The height at which the speech is hung is a physical rendering of how children sense the weight and breath and precarity of some speech but it is literally over their heads.
I conducted a number of interviews with elderly members of the black community some of those were difficult loaded emotional conversations. In those conversations elders were struggling to articulate themselves beyond the confines of tacit norms and permissions in black communities. It struck me that articulating yourself out of yourself, outside of the parameters of your community, is very hard indeed. This work is such a conversation.
The Caribbean literary tradition is huge and this work was finished in the week that Walcott died.
However I have always wanted to make a work that speaks to the weight of black oral culture in the context of dominant written word cultures.
This work was completed insecurely, the participants spoke of insecurity of meaning, insecurity of livelihood and selfhood. Often we have to create ourselves as selves before we can make anything else. Many black people are creative in this way, speaking themselves, out of themselves. Such creativity is necessarily insecure, and nothing less than the articulation of your whole self hangs from a thread.
Given the importance of orality in the Black vernacular this work is a turning point in my practice facilitated by black communities in the North of England and the intellectual context of
CARISCC whose papers enabled me to consider creative acts of survival, resilience and
bodaciousness as essentially speech acts of declaration and silence.
Shown at The British Library, and The MAC, England,
